My windows 10 "backup & restore (windows7)" runs every evening at 19.00h
when it does an incremental backup.
But sometimes (once every 6 months or so) it starts doing a completely new backup
(which takes about 3 days since I backup over wifi to a network drive).
Is this normal behaviour, cos I really don't see the point of this..?
Hi, whilst you may get a helpful specific reply, generally questions on Backup and Restore go unanswered- people find this awkward and unreliable.
It's great you're creating images; a good number here have found a 3rd party solution much better.
E.g. Macrium Reflect (free) + boot medium + external storage
- more feature rich
- maintained, supported and updated
- much more reliable and robust
I just read today a new feature will be introduced this month in v7 that will make incremental and differential imaging very much faster.
Thanks
I have crashplan going to both cloud and local HD (hooked up to my pc).
I use Windows backup as a THIRD one just to be safe
It works without problems, besides the issue as described..
The whole point of an incremental backup is that it increments the changes from one full backup until the next. There is also a diffential type where the changes are consolidated in each backup so only two backups (full and last differential), are needed for a restore
It is normal practice with a daily backup scheme to run a full backup on a set day, ( lets say Monday), and then run incremental backups for the rest of the week until the next full backup is run on the next Full Backup (Monday). If you need to recover from a disaster state then to get back to a usable state you would restore from the full back-up and then each of the Daily incremental backups so it could be you need to restore 7 backups Full plus 6 incremental, if the problem occurred on Sunday after the backup.
The incremental backups are likely to be quite small on a system that does not get changed often, but the longer the time between full backups the larger they will become and all are needed to recover a system
It looks like in your case you may have to restore up to 180 backups (given the daily incremental count over 6 months). It appears that there is some maximum count, (Numerical or Time based), in the backup software, that forces a full backup after a set time.
If you are doing a differential backup then only the full and the last differential is required for restore but after six months the Differential would likely be far larger than the full
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