Going back to my previous example, suppose that you wanted to restore the backup from Wednesday. The primary disadvantage of incremental backups is that they can be time-consuming to restore.

Wednesday's backup files would only contain the data that has changed since Tuesday and so on. Tuesday's scheduled backup would only contain the data that has changed since Monday. Incremental backups only back up the data that has changed since the previous backup.įor example, suppose that you created a full backup on Monday and used incremental backups for the rest of the week. Incremental backups were introduced as a way to increase backup speed and decrease the storage space that it takes to do a full backup.

Because not every organization has the time or storage space for frequent full backups, other types are often necessary.