[ The PC Guide | System Care Guide | Backups and Disaster Recovery | Disaster Recovery ]

System Recovery from Incremental Backups

Incremental backups contain only the files that have been changed since the time that the last full backup was performed. This means that they cannot be used by themselves to perform a full recovery of a system in the event of disaster.

To perform a proper recovery when you use incremental backups, you must go back to the last full backup you performed and restore all the files on it first. Then you must restore the first incremental made since that full backup, and then the next one, and so on, until you restore the most recently-made incremental backup. If you are doing a full backup once per week and then incrementals every other day, in the worst case you will have to do restores from seven different media sets. This isn't something you're going to do very often (you hope!) but it is still tedious and one reason why some people do not use incremental backups.

Next: Single-Step Recovery

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