What Is Incremental Backup and How Can I Benefit from It?

You probably already know how essential the process of backing up is to protecting your data from getting lost or corrupted, but did you know that devising and implementing an efficient and optimal backup strategy can be quite complex? Backup services and plugins may simplify the process of backup, but the variety of particular types of backup operations they offer requires you to invest a bit more thought into making a choice of tool and strategy.

In this article we’ll go over the main three types of backup — full, incremental, and differential — and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each. Then we’ll zero in on incremental backups in particular and 10Web’s backup service in general. Finally, we’ll give answers to a few popular backup-related questions and let you make the educated choice. Let’s dive right in!

What’s a full backup?

A full backup is the “classic” type of backup, what you think of when you think about the backup process intuitively. Namely, it is an exact copy of all your files and folders. A full backup is the starting point of all your other backups: initially you definitely need to make a copy of the entirety of your data to be able to safely restore. Here are the most important advantages and disadvantages of full backups:

• Fast restore. It’s faster and simpler to restore from a single file that contains all the data, which is an important advantage.
• Single file storage. Keeping all the backed up data in a single file results in better storage management. Besides, full backups are self-contained.
• High storage space requirements compared to other backup types. Also, since you likely don’t change all your data that often, using only full backups wastes a lot of storage space.
• Potential security issues. Since all the data is stored in one place, if your backup media somehow gets accessed or compromised, you lose it all.
• Slowest type of backup. It does take quite a while to copy all those files if your site is somehow significant in size.

Keep in mind...

Nowadays full backups are almost always used in combination with one of the following “smarter” backup types we’ll discuss next.

What’s a differential backup?

A differential backup is when a backup creates copies of only the files changed since the last full backup. For example, if you’ve set your site to perform full backups only on Sundays and get by with just differential backups on other days of the week, this is how your backup process will go:

• Sunday: All the data.
• Monday: Changes since the Sunday backup.
• Tuesday: Changes since the Sunday backup (including the ones already backed up on Monday).

Here are the main differential backup advantages and disadvantages:

• Backing up is faster than in the case of full backups, and the storage requirements are significantly lower.
• The backup process runs longer than in the case of incremental backups and requires more storage space.

Keep in mind...

The nature of differential backups is that they inevitably grow in size as you make more and more changes. That’s why you absolutely need to perform periodical full backups to keep the size of the differential backups reasonable.

What’s an incremental backup?

An incremental backup stores all the changes made since the last backup, no matter if it was full, differential or incremental. For example, if you have a backup schedule of full backups on Sundays, incremental backups on all other days, this is how the process will go:

• Sunday: All the data.
• Monday: Changes since the Sunday backup.
• Tuesday: Changes since the Monday backup.

Incremental backups have these main points of advantages and disadvantages:

• They require less storage space and are faster than both full and differential backups because every backed up modification is a new one.
• However, it does take a while to restore from incremental backups: file recovery is pieced together from a typically large number of unique backups.
• There’s always the danger of one of the backups failing and subsequent incremental backups missing those files, so it’s always wise to perform periodic full backups in conjunction.

You can read about incremental backups in more detail here.

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Incremental vs Differential backup

Creating our very own backup service, which by the way is entirely free, super efficient, and reliable, has taught us quite a few things about the benefits of using incremental backups. So if you’re still pondering the “Incremental vs Differential” question, consider the following: while differential is good enough in some instances, incremental works a lot better for so many more.

For websites with static pages like an ‘About’ section, where this is not a lot of content, differential backups would work fine. However, in the case of more dynamic websites, differential is not the ideal choice as the storage will increase daily, costing more. Instead, incremental is far better for dynamic pages like online stores, where changes are made daily.

Why? Incremental backups are more reliable, use less of your data, are performed faster, and have more restore points. These are just some of the reasons why we’re team incremental at 10Web!

Answers to some general backup-related questions

What frequency of backup should I set?

It depends on how often you update your website and how crucial it is not to lose any data.

Thanks for reading!

Hope you learned more about incremental backups in particular and the process of backing up in general, and can make better choices when it comes to your data protection strategy. Which type of backup or combination of types do you use for your website? Has it been effective thus far? Any tips you’d like to add? We’ll be more than happy to hear from you in the comments section down below!

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