What’s an Incremental Backup?

☑️ Backing up is important, but terms like "full", "incremental", and "differential" backup can easily confuse. What's the best choice? I'll look at what these terms mean.

A full backup contains a copy of everything. An incremental backup contains a copy of only those things that changed since the previous backup. A differential backup contains a copy of only those things that changed since the most recent full backup. Unless you know otherwise, monthly full plus daily incremental backups are a good place to start.

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[askleonotenboom]

An incremental backup can save space by backing up only only what's changed since the previous day.

[victoriamarkova]

Thank you for the informational video!

[parkland]

I'm confused.. All I want to do is back up my PC occasionally, in the simplest possible way, so I have a complete, current picture of my laptop hard drive on an external hard drive . Ideally the update would only add or delete the most recent changes. Is that not what my WD software is doing?

[MrOnetwoseven]

Hi Leo: I'm doing something wrong when backing up. I was using Seagate which came with the external HD and then tried your version of thought. The problem is my external keeps filling up both methods. To do my backups after that I reformat the external and start over. What am I missing?

[rogerevans]

Are you saying with this example that you are talking about doing a full backup each day? I feel pretty sure you do not mean that because that would be impossible to continue.