Data loss can spell disaster for your business. Research shows that over nine in 10 businesses are forced to shut down after experiencing a data loss event. You can protect your business from data loss, however, by creating backups. Backups are copies of your business’s data. Even if a data record is lost or deleted, you can restore it from a backup. But rather than creating full backups, you may want to create incremental backups.
What Are Incremental Backups?
Incremental backups are successional copies that only contain the changes made since the last incremental backup. You can create incremental backups of a storage drive, for instance. Each incremental backup will only contain the changes made since the last incremental backup.
Full backups involve complete copies. If you create a full backup of your computer’s storage drive each week, you’ll have to copy all of the data on the storage drive each week. There are backups tools, of course, that can automate this process. Nonetheless, full backups are complete copies. Incremental backups are not complete copies. Incremental backups only contain changes made since the last incremental backup.
Benefits of Incremental Backups
Since they only include changes — as opposed to complete copies — incremental backups are faster. Depending on the size of your computer’s storage drive, it may take hours to perform a complete backup. Incremental backups, on the other hand, may take just minutes.
Incremental backups also consume less storage space. Whether it’s a full backup or incremental backup, the copied data must be stored somewhere. After all, that’s the entire purpose of creating backups. Storing the copied data will allow you to retrieve it if your business suffers a data loss event.
Incremental backups are always smaller than full backups. Each full backup consists of a complete copy. If you create full backups each week, you’ll have four complete copies over the course of a month. All of this redundant data will consume space. You may need to upgrade your server’s storage drive or purchase a more expensive cloud storage plan. Alternatively, you can use incremental backups. Incremental backups are smaller in size because they aren’t complete copies; they are partial copies that consist entirely of recent changes.
In Conclusion
Most people assume that all backups are complete copies of a storage drive, but this isn’t the case. There are many different types of backips. Incremental backups are those that only contain changes made to a storage drive since the last incremental backup.