How Many Increments?

The problem with incremental is that when you lose one increment in the chain, you lose the whole set. Differentials do not have that problem and would be my second choice (first choice are full images).

I would suggest you make a new base after 5 or 6 increments, and keep at least 3 sets (grandfather approach).

wanchoo said:

After one has begun on a new base, all the earlier increments can be safely deleted to save disk space.

whs said:

The problem with incremental is that when you lose one increment in the chain, you lose the whole set. Differentials do not have that problem and would be my second choice (first choice are full images).

I would suggest you make a new base after 5 or 6 increments, and keep at least 3 sets (grandfather approach).

That depends. It is a timing problem. The previous base may not be the one you want. And disk space should really be no problem these days where most people have acres of it.

Hello Seekermeister,

When you create a Windows backup (scheduled or not) through "Backup and Restore", they will be incremental backups. You will be able to create as many as you like until you run out of the max space (see Option Two at link) that is set to be used for backups at that location. When you run out of space, Windows will automatically start deleting the oldest "Backup File" in the "Backup Set" (incremental) to make room for the newest incremental backup, and update the entire incremental backup so as not to lost the whole thing as Wolfgang described above.

I think creating new differential backups each time would be better if you have the HDD space for them. This way you could delete one without wiping out the whole backup since each one is it's own whole backup. If you like the tutorial below can show you how to have a shortcut to use to create new differential backups each time instead of incremental ones through Backup and Restore.

Backup - Make a "Create New Backup" Shortcut

Hope this helps. :)

I would go with Differential over Incremental as well, since a differential anywhere in the chain is stand alone, in the sense it only needs the last Full image.
Where-as Incrementals rely on every piece of the chain.

It would be a good idea to do a full backup periodically, although I must admit Ive not had any issues restoring from a differntial any where in the chain.

Couple ways you could go about it:

You can either have the differential continue on a schedule, and clean up after itself deleting some that are a certain age or however you want.
But, have a second Schedule that just does Full Images, say every 2 weeks or once a month.
this way you always have something to fall back on in case the Differential fails.

Or you can do something along the line of .. Start a New Differential chain after 6 differentials.
Basically, a new Full Image weekly, and daily differentials. Maybe keep the last 4-8 chains.
This would be my prefered method.

Differentials are the way to go. I do one full image a week and a differential every day. I keep three sets of backups.

Incrementals will generally be faster than differentials but as stated above If you lose one then any later ones are useless. Not only that but restoring from a long incremental chain can take forever as it restores the base first and then applies each incremental in the chain sequentially.

You should do full images as often as you would if you were not doing differentials. Regard taking differentials as a bonus to allow you to have a more recent backup if anything goes wrong.