Differential Backup & Incremental Backup

TurboBackup provides you with the options to perform full backup, differential backup and incremental backup. You should perform full backup periodically or before any major system changes to protect all your important data and files. You should always use full backup to back up your System State. You can perform full backup, differential backup, or incremental backup for backup of files and folders.

Differential Backup is to back up files changed since the last full backup and Incremental Backup is to back up files changed since the last backup. Incremental backup is faster because there will always be fewer files to back up since the last backup than the last full backup. Restoring differential backup is faster because you only have to restore the full backup and then only one differential backup while restoring incremental backup requires that you restore the entire set of incremental backups.

What is Differential Backup?

Differential backup will only backup files changed since the last full backup based on time stamp. When you run a differential backup for the first time, it will always perform a full backup because the last backup is empty. You can review a backup task status in the View Pane, Backup Summary tab at the bottom of the main program window. Right click on a task in the Backup Summary tab and select Reset to clear the task if you want to reset it and force the differential backup to perform a new full backup and start over again.

How to set the Differential Backup Option?

You can set global option in the Tools > Default Options menu. The new global settings will apply to all new backup tasks. You can also set the Differential Backup option for the selected task only by clicking the Options button in the Backup Wizard Review dialog.

What is Incremental Backup?

Incremental backup will only backup files changed since the last incremental backup. You have the option to perform incremental backup based on time stamp or archive bit ("A"). When you run an incremental backup task based on time stamp for the first time, it will always perform a full backup because the last backup is empty. You can review a backup task status in the View Pane, Backup Summary tab at the bottom of the main program window. Right click a task in the Backup Summary tab and select Reset to clear the task if you want to reset it and force the incremental backup to perform a new full backup and start over again.

How to set the Incremental Backup Option?

You can set global option in the Tools > Default Options menu. The new global settings will apply to all new backup tasks. You can also set the Incremental Backup option for the selected task only by clicking the Options button in the Backup Wizard Review dialog.

Note: It is important that you keep every incremental backup since you first run the incremental backup task because you need all of them for restore. You can check off the Add date and time as part of the Backup name option in Default Options, which will apply to new backups, or name each backup file differently, or store each backup at a different location, like in different folders or on different CDs.