Business Essentials Objective 5.00 Business Technology Practice Test

Incremental backups capture only the data that has changed since the last backup of any type. This means after you’ve done a full backup, each subsequent backup records only the files that were modified since the previous backup (whether that previous one was full or incremental). That’s what makes a backup incremental: it builds on the most recent backup rather than copying everything again, saving time and storage space. For restoration, you’d start with the last full backup and then apply each incremental backup in order to reconstruct the current state. This chain is why incremental backups are efficient for daily use, but it also means you need all the intervening backups to restore. This differs from backing up all data (a full backup) and from backing up changes since the last full backup (a differential backup). It also isn’t limited to system files, which would omit most user data.