Full and Incremental Backups
Before going into detail about backup hardware and archiving programs, you need to know about the two basic backup types:
- Full backup
An archive of everything on a filesystem or directory
- Incremental backup
An archive of all items that have changed since the last full backup
In large-scale operations, there are more kinds of backups, and you may hear of cumulative and differential backups. These are levels between incremental and full backups — that is, an incremental backup may contain all of the changes since the last differential backup, and the differential backup, in turn, could contain all changes since the last full backup. However, for small systems where you do backups by hand, it is reasonable to deal only with ...
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