Knowledge base

Backing-up is a crucial process that everyone should do in order to have a fail-safe, for when the inevitable happens. The principle is to make copies of particular data in order to use those copies for restoring the information if a failure occurs (a data loss event due to deletion, corruption, theft, viruses, etc.)

Mirror backup is identical to a full backup, with the exception that the files can be compressed/encrypted only individually. Mirror backups keep only the latest file versions in the destination (no versioning). A mirror backup is most frequently used to create an exact copy of your data in the destination.

Incremental backup stores all files changed since the last FULL, DIFFERENTIAL OR INCREMENTAL backup. The advantage of an incremental backup is that it takes the least time to finish. The disadvantage is that during a restore operation, each increment is processed and this could result in a lengthy restore job.

The full backup type copies all selected files and folders. Full backup is time consuming (when compared to incremental and differential backup types), but it allows the fastest and easiest restore. It is the starting point of all other backup types.

This article shows how to create a full backup of the given sources to a specified destination using Backup4all. The current method can be extended to other sources and destinations supported.