WHAT DOES AN INCREMENTAL BACKUP MEANS?

WHAT DOES AN INCREMENTAL BACKUP MEANS?   

Incremental backup can be defined as the process of taking backups whenever a change or update is noticed. It compares the previously saved data and then make the new backup. This backup requires to have previous backed up data, it can be a full system backup or a fragment of previous backup.

Unlike the incremental backup, full system backup makes copy of the entire database and its dependent files & folders. Making a full back up every day will fill up all your storage space, creating the redundant copies of the same thing. Taking full backups takes a lot of time and leaves your site unresponsive for some time. This will affect your website’s efficiency, resulting unhappy users.

This will let you save your storage spaces and avoid redundancy. All this without disturbing the basic functionality of your website. Thus backing up your data incrementally will not only save your data but also your resources and users.

Taking backups regularly is a good thing but doing it incrementally is smart. Since the entire backup is made incrementally or you can say it is in small fragments. Which raises the question, how will you restore the whole data, if everything is fragmented? The backup is created in such a way that your site can be recreated as it was before. Overall restoration is possible and is easy. You can also restore a small portion of your site which you think is damaged or you can go for full restoration. And you can do this without concerning about the size of your website or wasting much time.

incremental backup

What if the backup you stored is attacked? With incrementally backing up your data you might feel that your data is safe but just to add some more security, one should save their backed up data in multiple locations. Storing copies of backup in different places will give you a sense of relief. How? Even if 8 out of 10 copies of your backups are deleted or infected in any way, you still have 2 copies of your backups left to work with. Just to be on the safe side always opt for a backup plugin which is providing you this services of making multiple copies of your data.

Backing up data incrementally is ideal for companies or firms having large websites or if you are working in Multisite environment with a huge network of sub sites. Backing up data incrementally is also an obvious choice because it reduces the load on server and other resources. It can easily backup your entire website, irrespective of how large your sites are. It can do the task which could have taken hours in just few minutes. It also help you to manage your storage efficiently by making small changes in the backup file at a time.

Conclusion:

The best part of incremental backups is that, you are not backing up your data, so it will not matter even if you forgot to create backups. Your backup is created, stored and is safe.