Wednesday, 20 November 2019

Does built in Windows 7 backup perform differential (incremental) backups?


I have win 7 scheduled to backup every Sunday, it's only looking at one of my drives at the moment and is backing up to an external HDD. It's a 1TB drive so should take quite a while to fill but the amount of time the backup takes makes me think its taking a fresh copy every time.


It's now 21:34 and I think backup started at about 19:30. It did a full backup earlier in the week of approx 200GB. Is it copying the whole lot again? Or is it just taking its time checking for differences?



Answer



Windows 7 Backup is a block based file backup.


This means each block in a file is examined and if a duplicate already exists on the last backup, and this is the important bit, even if from a different file, that block is not saved. Quite good :)


The first backup is always a full backup. The following backups will only save changed blocks. Disadvantage is you cannot manage your backups individually.


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