Incremental Forever Backup: Addressing Modern Backup Challenges

How Incremental Forever backup outperforms differential or incremental backup strategies

Backup technology has been a staple in IT for decades, providing businesses with a safety net against data loss. Yet, the fundamental methods - full, incremental, and differential backups - haven’t evolved much over the years. While reliable, these approaches are fraught with inefficiencies, especially in today's era of hybrid and cloud-first infrastructures.

Enter "incremental forever" backup: a modern backup methodology designed to overcome the limitations of traditional backup methods and instead focuses on speed, storage efficiency, and reliability.

In this post, we’ll dive into the pros and cons of traditional backup types, explain why incremental forever is a game-changer, and show how this approach fits into your local, cloud, and hybrid backup strategy.

The Challenges with Traditional Backup Methods

To appreciate the benefits of incremental forever, let’s examine the three most common backup strategies.

While each method has its strengths, none fully addresses today's need for efficiency, scalability, and - most importantly - cost across local and cloud storage locations. That's where the relatively new incremental forever backup scheme comes in.

How Incremental Forever Works

Incremental forever is a misleading name because it implies similarity to incremental backups, which are generally considered the least reliable of the various backup schemes. But Incremental Forever is far from unreliable.

At its core, Incremental Forever builds on the strengths of traditional incremental and differential backups while eliminating their weaknesses. Here's how:

• Initial Full backup: The process starts with a single, complete backup of all selected files.

• Incremental backups only: Subsequent backups capture only the changes since the last backup, leveraging the speed and storage efficiency of traditional incremental backups.

• Efficient data linking: What's unique about Incremental Forever is that each increment contains links to all previous versions of a file or folder, even if it hasn't changed and therefore hasn't been backed up. Similar to differential backup, each increment retains all information, ensuring that a complete data set is always available for recovery, but without data redundancy between backup files.

Key Advantages of Incremental Forever

1. Shorter backup windows

Because incremental forever only captures changes since the last backup, backup times are significantly reduced after the initial full backup. This is especially beneficial for organizations with limited bandwidth or MSPs managing customers with large data sets.

2. Reduced storage costs

Incremental forever eliminates the redundancy inherent in differential backups. You store only what's needed, reducing cloud storage costs - a critical factor for SMBs and MSPs working on tight budgets.

For example, compared to a full+differential backup strategy, a similarly configured incremental forever backup can save more than 80% of storage space.

3. Simplified restores

Restores are quicker and easier. The system uses the links in the incremental backups to find all the data it needs. Users don't have to worry about managing full or incremental chains or searching for the exact backup file. Everything is automated.

4. Retention flexibility

Incremental forever handles retention policies slightly differently than other backup schemes. For example, with an incremental or differential backup strategy, a 30-day retention policy meant that the entire backup file older than 30 days would be deleted. With incremental forever, only the files or portions of files that are not needed to ensure a complete restore are removed, not the entire backup. This ensures that critical data is always available while maintaining efficient storage usage.

For more details on how incremental forever works and how a retention policy affects backups, watch this video:

Incremental Forever in Action

Here's what an incremental forever backup strategy with NovaBACKUP looks like in practice:

Local or Cloud Backup Only

Choose your backup storage, select the files you want to back up, and you're ready to go. The first backup may take some time because it has to send all the selected data to the storage of your choice. However, subsequent backups are lightning fast, since only the changes to a file, as defined by its dates, sizes, or other attributes, are sent (this avoids the unreliability of older methods that use the archive bit of a file to identify changes made to it).

Hybrid Backup (Local + Cloud)

A hybrid backup with NovaBACKUP combines local and cloud backup in one backup job, sending all data first to the selected local storage device and then from there to the cloud.

Using an incremental forever backup strategy, backups to both local and cloud storage are fast, while redundant data storage ensures a reliable backup for disaster recovery. In addition, NovaBACKUP is smart enough to know which storage device to restore your data from, always favoring the fastest option without you having to remember where the data is stored.

Backup Strategy Tips

To get the most out of backups that use the incremental forever method, follow these best practices:

1. Define your RTO and RPO

Your recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) will guide your backup frequency and retention settings.

Run critical backups more frequently, such as hourly or daily, while scheduling less critical backups weekly.

2. Segment backup jobs by priority

Create separate jobs for critical business data (e.g., financial records, client files) and less essential data (e.g., archived emails).

3. Leverage rotating media (if applicable)

Each piece of media receives a new initial backup. With NovaBACKUP, this process is seamless, but make sure your backup software supports this functionality if you're using another solution.

How Restores Work with Incremental Forever

One of the most important advantages of incremental forever backup with NovaBACKUP is the simplicity of restores.

• Unified restore view: Users can select any backup point and see the entire file and folder structure exactly as it was at that time. As a user, you no longer have to figure out "which" backup contains the data you need to restore.

• Automated data retrieval: The software knows where to find all the data it needs, whether it's in the initial full backup, subsequent increments, or whatever backup storage it's on.

• Selective restores: Instead of restoring an entire chain, users can recover individual files or folders without having to restore every single backup made.

For MSPs, this means less time spent managing restores for clients. For SMBs, it translates to minimal downtime during recovery.

Why Incremental Forever is the Future

Incremental forever is a modern solution tailored to meet the demands of today’s hybrid and cloud-first environments. By combining speed, storage efficiency, and restore simplicity, it empowers SMBs and MSPs to optimize their backup strategies without sacrificing their recovery objectives.

Try NovaBACKUP’s Incremental Forever Backup

NovaBACKUP's implementation of incremental forever takes this a step further by providing seamless integration for local, cloud, and hybrid backups.

Ready to see how incremental forever can revolutionize your backup process? Test NovaBACKUP for 14 days and discover the speed, efficiency, and simplicity of a truly modern backup solution.

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