By now, anybody reading this site should already know how important it is to maintain a good backup habit.Storagepipe

Every day, nasty people are coming up with new and innovative ways to exploit or infect your computer. And every new attack chips away at the integrity of your machine in small ways, increasing the chances that your computer could possibly crash or loses some of it important data.

10 years ago, backing up files regularly was a real hassle. But today, thanks to online backup, this process is completely automated. You just install a piece of software, and it does all the work for you without having to lift a finger.

One of the biggest challenges faced by online backup software designers is the incredibly rapid pace at which data storage is growing. It’s not uncommon (especially amongst businesses) for people to report their data storage growing by 50% or more per year.

In the old days of backup, we would simply copy over an entire hard drive over to tape, and take that tape off-site. This was a fairly simple process since there wasn’t that much data to copy.

But as computers became faster and more efficient, they were able to produce much more data in a smaller amount of time. It eventually got to the point where backups were too large to perform during off-business hours.

The solution to this was to create an “incremental” backup schedule. Full backups were performed about once per month, and then nightly backups would only copy over the files which had changed on a daily basis.

This would leave you with one gigantic full backup every month, and 30 tiny “point-in-time” backups. If you ever needed to recover your data, you would simply load the master backup and then updated with the most recent incremental record.

Although this was a good system for dealing with growing data storage, it made recovery somewhat cumbersome. An ideal solution should get rid of that full monthly backup completely.

This is the idea behind “incremental forever” backups.

With the incremental forever methodology, you only need to perform one full transfer when you first set up your backup software. After this, all of your incremental uploads will be combined with the full backup once it arrives at the backup server.

This means that you only need to download a single set of backups in order to restore. When you’re panicking and trying to recover from an emergency, this is much more convenient than fiddling around with 30 different tapes.

This also means that your incremental backups are being appended to your most recent update instead of your original full upload. Since your last backup is always a full version, this eliminates the need for the full monthly upload.

Not only is this an elegant way to deal with data growth, but it also makes efficient use of bandwidth when used as part of an online backup solution.

These are just a few of the reasons why incremental forever backups have become so popular, and why they will continue to grow in popularity in the future.

About The Author: In 2001, Storagepipe Solutions became one of the first companies to offer an online backup service with support for the incremental forever technology that is now a standard feature for most backup providers.