Inremental back ups - which to keep?

I am trialing TI. When I make incremental back ups, which ones do I need to keep? Any except the first one and the most recent? Thanks.

Rick

 

Quick answer:
You need the Full backup and ALL the incrementals taken since the Full B/U in order to do a complete restore.

 

So, the incremental things doesn't work correctly, as i have a Windows partition of 10GB, first full backup made an image of 6gbs, 1 week later an incremental backup added 2 new files first 2gigs big and the second 3 gigs big (which means 5 gb) of new information for the same 10gb partition....

shouldn't incremental add only new data

 

Hello ramik,

No. TI images in-use sectors not files. When it creates an image it it also includes a "thumbprint" of the in-use sectors it has just imaged. When you then create an incremental it compares the thumbprint of the previous image against the one that is about to be imaged. Only in-use sectors that have changed will be included in the new incremental.

Now what you have to bear in mind is that carrying out a defrag between images, and/or merely opening and closing Windows and applications, will significantly change the the thumbprint of in-use sectors. Hence, when you only have a small amount of used space (6GB as in your case), such disk activity will have a greater proportional affect on any incremental images.

Regards

 

So if you do daily or weekly incremental back ups, you will end up with a much larger total file size than if you did a new back up each time? What is the advantage of incremental back up?

Rick

 

I think the most important benefit of Incrementals is Time. Full backups on my system run 3 times as long as a Incremental.


Storage_man

 

...but you could run a full back up every time, without incrementals, if you're more concerned about space. Generally, it will be quicker to restore a full, one piece backup than a multi-part incremental. Ya pays yer money and takes yer place on the swing or the roundabout...

 

Hello Rick,

As I intimated above, incrementals make sense once you have a lot of data on your hard drive (e.g. 10GB or more).

Regards