Once you have decided where to do your backup, in other words, locally or online you will need to decide which type of backup to use.

There are essentially three types of backup, full, incremental and differential. They each have their advantages and disadvantages. This page will describe them simply and clearly so that you can decide which is best for you.

This one is the easiest to understand. With this type of backup you decide which files you want backed up and the complete files are backed up each time the backup procedure runs. This type of backup obviously takes the longest amount of time to run because you are backing up your compete set of data each time. If the size of your data set is small then time will not be a major issue.

The main advantage of a full harddrive backup is that when you need to restore a file the restore will take the least amount of time as compared to the other types of backup for the same size of data set.

In this case, although all your chosen files are backed up the system only stores the difference between the original back up and the current data set. So once you have processed your initial full backup, on each subsequent occasion the software will look at all your files and then only backup any of the changes that have been made since the original full backup. Restoring data is not as fast as against a normal full backup but it is not as slow as an incremental backup.

As time goes by the changes to the files in the original hard drive backup become larger and more time and space is required to create these files that contain the differences between the original backup file and the current situation of the files. There will come a point where the size of the differential files becomes closer to the size of the original backup. Once that situation has been reached or even some time before that you will need to start all over gain as it were and create another full backup and begin running the differential backups from that new full back up for the future.

This type uses the least amount of space to create a hard drive backup but takes the longest amount of time to restore data. Essentially after you have done your original full backup the system only stores the changes that have happened since the last backup was run. Therefore when you do a restore the system potentially needs to look through every single backup to recreate the file that you are restoring. On the plus side the backup itself takes the least amount of time because the procedure is only looking for changes since the very last backup.