User's Manual

Generally, a differential backup will be recovered faster than an incremental one, as it does not have

to process through a long chain of previous backups.

A standalone full backup might be an optimal solution if you often roll back the system to its initial

state or if you do not like to manage multiple files. If you are interested in saving only the last data

state to be able to recover it in case of system failure, consider the differential backup. It is

particularly effective if your data changes tend to be few compared to the full data volume.

The same is true for incremental backup. These are most useful when you need frequent backups and

the ability to roll back to a specific point in time. Having created a full backup once, if you then create

an incremental backup each day of a month, you will get the same result as if you created full

backups every day. Incremental images are considerably smaller than full or differential images.

Incremental or Differential?

The difference is typically that in an incremental backup, only the files changed or added since the

last time the backup ran are added to the archive. With a differential backup, all the files changed or

added since the initial full backup, are added to the archive. Thus, differential backups take longer to

run than incremental backups. When recovering from an incremental backup, the program must copy

the entire initial backup and then step through each of the previous backups to retrieve all the

updated files. A differential backup, on the other hand, can be recovered quicker because the

software must copy only the original backup and the most recent one.

An incremental or differential backup created after a disk is defragmented might be considerably

larger than usual. This is because the defragmentation program changes file locations on the disk and

the backups reflect these changes. Therefore, it is recommended that you re-create a full backup

after disk defragmentation.

3.3. Backup file naming conventions

Let's remember that Acronis True Image Home 2010 Netbook Edition may split a full or incremental

archive into volumes either when a user sets the splitting option or when a large backup having a size

bigger than 4GB is saved to a FAT32 disk. See "Backup archive components" in Acronis True Image

Home 2010 Netbook Edition basic concepts.

Though users may assign any name to backups, many would still prefer using automatic naming and

the below information may come in handy when viewing the contents of a backup archive storage in

Windows Explorer and trying to figure out, e.g. which are full and which are incremental.

1) When you agree to use the One-Click Backup offered during the first start of the newly installed

program, the resultant backup file is named simply "Backup.tib". Since in this case the subsequent

automatically scheduled backups will overwrite the previous one (once every seven days by default),

the backup file name(s) will remain unchanged.

When saved to a FAT32 disk, such backup may be split into volumes with the names Backup.tib,

Backup2.tib, Backup3.tib, etc.

2) When you create a new full backup task at a new destination, the backup gets the name

"MyBackup.tib".

If a backup is split (either automatically, e.g. due to the 4GB file size limit on FAT32 disks or when

configuring a backup task), the constituent backup files (volumes) are named as follows: