5 full, incremental and differential backups, Full, incremental and differential backups – Acronis Backup for Windows Server Essentials - User Guide User Manual

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Copyright © Acronis International GmbH, 2002-2014

Acronis
Scheduler2
Service

Providing scheduling for tasks performed by Acronis
components

Local System

Dependencies on other services

The main services depend on Acronis Scheduler2 Service and on the following standard Windows
services: Remote Procedure Call (RPC) and Protected Storage. Acronis Managed Machine Service
and Acronis Storage Node Service also depend on the Windows Management Instrumentation
standard service.

To view the list of dependencies for a service, do the following:

1. In the Services snap-in, double-click the name of the service.
2. On the Dependencies tab, examine the This service depends… field.

3.5 Full, incremental and differential backups

Acronis Backup provides the capability to use popular backup schemes, such as
Grandfather-Father-Son and Tower of Hanoi, as well as to create custom backup schemes. All backup
schemes are based on full, incremental and differential backup methods. The term "scheme" in fact
denotes the algorithm of applying these methods plus the algorithm of the archive cleanup.

Comparing backup methods with each other does not make much sense because the methods work
as a team in a backup scheme. Each method should play its specific role according to its advantages.
A competent backup scheme will benefit from the advantages of all backup methods and lessen the
influence of all the methods’ shortcomings. For example, weekly differential backup facilitates
archive cleanup because it can be easily deleted along with the weekly set of daily incremental
backups depending on it.

Backing up with the full, incremental or differential backup method results in a backup (p. 431) of the
corresponding type.

Full backup

A full backup stores all data selected for backup. A full backup underlies any archive and forms the
base for incremental and differential backups. An archive can contain multiple full backups or consist
of only full backups. A full backup is self-sufficient - you do not need access to any other backup to
recover data from a full backup.

It is widely accepted that a full backup is the slowest to do but the fastest to restore. With Acronis
technologies, recovery from an incremental backup may be not slower than recovery from a full one.

A full backup is most useful when:

you need to roll back the system to its initial state

this initial state does not change often, so there is no need for regular backup.

Example: An Internet cafe, school or university lab where the administrator often undoes changes
made by the students or guests but rarely updates the reference backup (in fact, after installing
software updates only). The backup time is not crucial in this case and the recovery time will be
minimal when recovering the systems from the full backup. The administrator can have several
copies of the full backup for additional reliability.

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