Acronis True Image Home 2012 offers you three backup methods:
1) Full: contains all of the data at the moment of the backup creation. It forms a base for further incremental or differential backups. It can also be used as a standalone backup.
2) Incremental: Only those files will be included which have been changed since the LAST backup.
3) Differential: Only those files will be included which have been changed since the last FULL backup.
We suggest you to choose one of the following three approaches of using the backup methods:
"Full" - A standalone full backup might be an optimal solution if you often roll back the system to its initial state or if you do not like to manage multiple files.
"Incremental" - These are most useful when you need frequent backups and the ability to roll back to a specific point in time. Having created a full backup once, if you then create an incremental backup each day of a month, you will get the same result as if you created full backups every day of the month. As a rule, incremental backups are considerably smaller than full or differential backups.
Such a backup scenario may consist of a weekly full system backup with intermediate, daily backups that cover data that was changed since the LAST backup.
This scenario, while requiring less storage space and time for the daily backups, will require more work on your part to provide recovery after a system crash. In the event of a Thursday crash, you would have to recover the last FULL backup followed by the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday incremental backups.
"Differential" – is an intermediate between the first two approaches. Each differential backup includes all the files changed since the last full backup. It takes less time and space than "Full", but more than "Incremental". The good thing is that recovering is simpler than for (2) - you'll have to recover the last full backup and the last differential backup.
To choose a desired backup method, you need to configure a custom backup scheme. For more information see Custom schemes.
An incremental or differential backup created after a disk is defragmented might be considerably larger than usual. This is because the defragmentation program changes file locations on the disk and the backups reflect these changes. Therefore, it is recommended that you re-create a full backup after disk defragmentation.
If you lose an incremental backup or it becomes corrupted, all later incremental backups will be unusable.