use of incremental backups without full backup

[Pants]

Is there any way incremental backups can be restored without the first full backup?

Say instead of restoring the full backup, you reinstalled the OS and all the programs, then restored the incrementals. Would there be too many bugs or conflicts?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

It's all about the chain.
The most recent incremental relies on the tape before it...and so on and so forth. "Changed data since last backup". Typically there's a Full on say...Monday, and rest of the week are increes.

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/resource/solutions/backup/2005/incremental-backups.html

 

[Pants]

The reason I ask is because if for some reason the initial full backup is lost, maybe you can rebuild something close to it, and then restore the incrementals?

I understand what incremental backups are. But I was wondering if it would be possible to restore the chain, if the reinstalled OS/image wasn't 100% identical to the original (initial) backup. I hope that makes sense.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Your concern is exactly why I never setup, or supported...incrementals or differentials, back in the days of tape backup. I always did full backups every time.

 

[nlinecomputers]

Yep it is like loosing a drive in a RAID 0 stripe. The whole stripe is lost that way.

 

[Vicenarian]

Well, if they're file backups (not image backups), you might be able to unzip/etc. the incrementals and extract the files that way?

 

[cypress]

I love full backups.

 

[Pants]

Windows Backup and Restore seems to do a decent job managing increments when it DOES work. It seems to work fine restoring in a regular bios/mbr type setup (not uEFI/gpt, as I've experienced)

Instead of dealing with individual backup increments, Windows integrates the parts of each FILE that have changed into the initial backup. So you only have one backup to restore when doing the restoration. But you also have an option to search through the incremented files through FILE EXPLORER. ...No longer called "Computer"... had a hard time figuring that one out.

 

[bg_bls]

I love full backups.

+1. Incremental/differential backups have more potential for something to go wrong. I always recommend full backups.

 

[TAPtech]

Full image based backups for me.

 

[cyabro]

I've had no issues with shadow protect and the continuous incrementals feature it has. One full backup to begin with and then incrementals from then on forever basically.
I've got machines with backup chains that are two or three years old and still working beautifully. I do like to restart the chain every year though just as a precaution.
Shadow protect also has other tools that does checks all the time to make sure the backup chain is recoverable.