Incremental Backup

Discussion in 'Acronis True Image Product Line' started by billbirchall, Oct 14, 2005.

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  1. billbirchall

    billbirchall Registered Member

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    I have just backed up my C: Drive on 3 dvd's. Do I have to continue to incrementally back up on dvd's or could I use an external hard drive for the increments. If the latter, presumably I could set the increment to back up on a regular schedule and let it work in the background? I am new to backing up so apologies if this is a nonsense question.

    Regards

    Bill Birchall
     
  2. billbirchall

    billbirchall Registered Member

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    Have I got the correct forum for this question as I would have thought that it was pretty basic and yet no-one has responded!!

    Bill Birchall
     
  3. noonie

    noonie Registered Member

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    It is adviseable to put your images of your complete drive on another hdrive, whether it is internal or external first, then put it on optical media for a further backup. If you want to do incrementals in the background that is fine. I preferr complete images.
     
  4. dscrap

    dscrap Registered Member

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    I'm not sure what the big deal about incremental backups is... If you are a home user and not running a server, then it’s not really a necessity to back up that much.

    You just need a clean install of your system with the applications you use and image that. All data files, documents, picture, MP3,s should be backed up manually since they wont change and take up a lot of space in an image file.

    Make one master image of the system with a clean install and that’s all you'll ever need. If you do incremental back ups and your system crashes in 3 months and you restore, chances are you will have the same problem down the road. Just restore the master image and you are back to a fresh system with no problems.

    If you are using applications that save file regularly, like Outlook for email, change the default location of its files to another partition that is not included in the image file. That way when you restore the image file, the data files for various applications will still be there and the links in the image file should already point to the location on a different partition.

    The reason I said Outlook, because that is a great example of a program that stores files. Normally all of the emails you receive and send, contacts, and colanders are contained in a file called Outlook.pst which is on the C:\ by default. Changing its location allows you to back up the file manually and decreases the size of the image file.

    Good luck!
     
  5. jmk94903

    jmk94903 Registered Member

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    Hi Bill,

    The full backup has to be on the same drive/folder as the incrementals, so if you have the full image on more than one DVD, you can't add incrementals.

    If you make a full image backup to your external hard drive, you can then do incrementals. However, if this is a backup for your operating system partition, you may find that the incrementals are not much smaller than a full backup since many files change on the Windows partition. In that case, it's probably smarter to just make full images.

    And, yes, you can use the scheduling feature to make the backups automatically. Although they can be made in the background, you might prefer to schedule them for when you won't be using the computer since the system can be rather sluggish due to the demand of making the backup.
     
  6. billbirchall

    billbirchall Registered Member

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    Thanks to you all for your very helpful replies.

    Regards

    Bill Birchall
     
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