Back Up Help Needed

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I have a media server with a 16Tb drive. I need to be backing this data up but i am confused if i should use Incremental back ups or differential backups. What i want is to be able to do a full back up and then just add new media to the back up as i add it to my main drive, also is this something i can do in Windows 11 or should i get a third party software?

Any help would be really appreciated
 
Either will work, but they work slightly differently:

Incremental - You take a full backup, next week you make an incremental backup, and every week thereafter. Each incremental only stores the bits that have changed that week. To restore however you need the full backup, and every incremental backup since. (To restore to a point of time you'd need the full backup and every incremental up to that point)

Differential - You take a full backup, every week you make a differential backup. Each differential backup stores everything that has changed since the full backup. To restore you only need the full backup and the latest differential backup. (or to restore to a different point of time you need the full backup and the differential from the appropriate point of time)


The risk with incremental is that they are dependant on each other - if one backup in the middle is corrupt or accidentally deleted then you have no way of restoring past that point. The advantage being that they are done quicker, and take less space - only storing the changes since the last incremental.


With either though you are probably best off still having regular full backups, and as with everything test that you can actually restore your backup before you need it.
 
Either will work, but they work slightly differently:

Incremental - You take a full backup, next week you make an incremental backup, and every week thereafter. Each incremental only stores the bits that have changed that week. To restore however you need the full backup, and every incremental backup since. (To restore to a point of time you'd need the full backup and every incremental up to that point)

Differential - You take a full backup, every week you make a differential backup. Each differential backup stores everything that has changed since the full backup. To restore you only need the full backup and the latest differential backup. (or to restore to a different point of time you need the full backup and the differential from the appropriate point of time)


The risk with incremental is that they are dependant on each other - if one backup in the middle is corrupt or accidentally deleted then you have no way of restoring past that point. The advantage being that they are done quicker, and take less space - only storing the changes since the last incremental.


With either though you are probably best off still having regular full backups, and as with everything test that you can actually restore your backup before you need it.
Sounds like differential is best for me, can Windows 11 do this or is third party software best?
 
Definitely use differential if you can get by with the space needed.

Ideally, go for a full backup every time but that's definitely overkill to be honest! If you've got a lot of data to backup it takes more time and space, but at least you know that if the backup passes verification, you're sorted.
 
A mirror copy using Sync based software is the other way. Will be one big copy for the first run, then after that will only copy files that are new/changed. Won't split things into "full" and "differential", it will just be a mirror of the main drive.
 
A mirror copy using Sync based software is the other way. Will be one big copy for the first run, then after that will only copy files that are new/changed. Won't split things into "full" and "differential", it will just be a mirror of the main drive.
This sounds interesting, do you have a piece of software in mind that can do this?
 
I use Syncback Free, but there were a couple of threads on here quite recently asking about backups and other syncing apps were mentioned there too.
 
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