What are differential and incremental backups?

Differential and incremental backups

Many times you've heard about backups, and each time you hear or read about backup, it merely refers to the act of saving important files, document, or data in alternative storage so that you can get back to get the document, file, or data when the primary/standard storage where it was saved gets damaged or corrupted.

Well, that’s literally what “backup” means. However, there are different types of backups, mainly “Differential Backup” and “Incremental Backup.” These types of backups come in handy when you deal with big data; thus, you need to know more about them.

What is an incremental backup?

You can’t really say that incremental backup is the opposite of differential backup. However, to put it in the simplest term possible, incremental backup is a backup strategy where changes made on a system, in between the full backup dates, are saved categorically. What does this mean? It simply means that, while differential backups save changes in-between full backup dates, cumulatively, incremental backups save changes individually/categorically.

Here’s an example:

Assuming a full backup runs every Sunday night, an incremental backup is adopted to save only new changes daily, until the next full backup day (next Sunday night). So, on Monday night, an incremental backup would save the changes from Sunday night to that moment (Monday night). Then on Tuesday, an incremental backup would only save changes from Monday night to that moment (Tuesday night). The cycle continues in this manner until the next Sunday night. Incremental backup is best for some people because it makes it easier to recover data; if you lost data that was created on Wednesday, you could simply load the incremental backup of Wednesday and have the file back.

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