Backup Types

Ok, so you know that you should be backing up all your information, however most people think that you always need to do an entire copy of your hard drive to create a backup. Noting could be more wrong. Although a full backup of all your hard drive can be handy, it will also be a time consuming task and it’s something that after a few backups (and countless hours wasted) will be thought of as useless and won’t be done anymore.

If you are looking forward to start backing up your data, or if you already have some backup solution, you should still know the different types of backups, how they work and the main advantages and disadvantages of each type.

There are mainly four different backup types: Full Backup, Incremental Backup, Differential Backup and Mirror Backup. Here’s a quick summary for each type.

• Full Backup: This is where it all starts, as a matter of fact all the other types, Incremental, Differential and Mirror, use a full backup as a starting point. A full backup is a full copy of the entire data source to be backed up, wether it is a path (folder) in your hard drive, an entire hard drive or some removable media.
• Incremental Backup: Once a full backup is performed, the incremental backup process will scan the original data source for files that have been modified or created after the last backup was completed and they will add such files to the original full backup. Incremental backup provides “versioning” which means that you can roll back to a specific state of the original datasource when restoring.
• Differential Backup: After the full backup has been created, it will compare the current data source state to the one in the backup and will keep track of the differences between them. Those differences will be recorded every time a new differential backup is performed.
• Mirror Backup: A mirror backup is an identical copy of the original data source, when files are modified in the original data source, they are overwritten in the mirror backup copy so that they are always identical. Mirror backups can be performed as several full backups or use some incremental technology to copy only those that have been modified.

The type of backup that’s ideal for you depends on several things, like if it will be performed locally, if backup speed is more important than restore speed or how much information will be backed up.