ACRONIS True Image 2013 User's Guide download pdf (Page 39)

3.2 Full, incremental and differential backups

True Image 2013 offers you three backup methods:

1) Full: contains all of the data at the moment of the backup creation. It forms a base for further

incremental or differential backups. It can also be used as a standalone backup.

2) Incremental: Only those files will be included which have been changed since the LAST backup.

3) Differential: Only those files will be included which have been changed since the last FULL backup.

We suggest you to choose one of the following three approaches of using the backup methods:

"Full" - A standalone full backup might be an optimal solution if you often roll back the system to its

initial state or if you do not like to manage multiple files.

"Incremental" - These are most useful when you need frequent backups and the ability to roll back to

a specific point in time. Having created a full backup once, if you then create an incremental backup

each day of a month, you will get the same result as if you created full backups every day of the

month. As a rule, incremental backups are considerably smaller than full or differential backups.

Such a backup scenario may consist of a weekly full system backup with intermediate, daily

backups that cover data that was changed since the LAST backup.

This scenario, while requiring less storage space and time for the daily backups, will require more

work for the program to provide recovery after a system crash. In the event of a Thursday crash,

the program would have to recover the Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday incremental backups

and the last FULL backup.

"Differential" – is an intermediate between the first two approaches. Each differential backup

includes all the files changed since the last full backup. It takes less time and space than "Full", but

more than "Incremental". The good thing is that recovering is simpler than for (2) - the program will

have to recover the last differential backup and the last full backup.

To choose a desired backup method, you usually need to configure a custom backup scheme. For

more information see Custom schemes (p. 61).

An incremental or differential backup created after a disk is defragmented might be considerably

larger than usual. This is because the defragmentation program changes file locations on the disk and

the backups reflect these changes. Therefore, it is recommended that you re-create a full backup

after disk defragmentation.

If you lose an incremental backup or it becomes corrupted, all later incremental backups will be unusable.

3.3 Backup file naming

By default, the program creates for each task a separate folder with task's name and then stores in

the folder all backups for that task (For example, D:\My Backups\System)

A backup file name has the following attributes:

 name of the task

 type of the backup (full, inc, diff :full, incremental, differential).

 number of backup, if applicable (in the form of b#)

 number of slice, if applicable (in the form of s#)

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ACRONIS True Image 2013 User's Guide Page 39