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.

Copy backup is a backup that copies all selected files but does not mark each file as having been backed up. In other words, the archive attribute is not cleared. Copying can be carried out between normal and incremental backups because copying does not affect these other backup operations.

Backup4all does not allow users to select multiple backup destinations for a single backup job. However, users can create multiple backup jobs assigned with the same backup tag and each job could have a different backup destination. When a backup tag is scheduled to run, all backup jobs containing that tag will run sequentially. It is specifically useful when you want to have the same backup stored on different destinations for increased data protection. For example you can have the same backup stored on a remote FTP location and also on an external hard drive - if one backup destination will become unavailable at least you can recover your data from the other destination.

The Backup list is the section visible in the middle column of the main window. It contains all the backup jobs defined that can be grouped into tags for easy handling. You can drag and drop backups in the list to re-order them.

This article shows how to create an incremental backup of the given sources to a specified destination using Backup4all. The current method can be extended to other sources and destinations supported by Backup4all. The incremental backup type performs a full back up on the first execution, then increments will be executed, including only new and modified files. It will create in destination a different zip file with the backup sources from each source drive.

When performing a large incremental backup to an FTP destination, it may take a lot of time for the first backup to complete (because the first backup is a full backup so all files will be included in it). If you have physical access to the FTP destination server, it takes less time to run the first backup locally, move the backup file to the FTP, and after that continue doing the incremental backups directly to the FTP destination. This article will explain how to perform this backup.