incremental backups

Bunker Backup works incrementally. Each time you backup whether this is your normal automated backup or an additional backup you have instigated manually, Bunker Backup will back up:

• all new files you have created since the last backup; and
• all changes to existing files.

The new files Bunker Backup backs up will be those that are inside existing folders you have selected for backup or they will be new files you have added to your backup set. As, in either event, they are new to your backup set, they will be backed up in their entirety.

Existing files that have been changed will not be backed up in their entirety; only that part of the file that has changed will be backed up. In simple terms if in a document you have added a comma it is the comma and its binary location within the document that are date stamped and backed up, not the whole document itself. This “incremental binary backup” has a number of advantages.

The most important benefit is that it will allow many different versions of the same document to be kept simultaneously. Let’s assume you are working on a proposal for a particularly important client. You are into your fifth rewrite of the paper when you think how good it would be to have the version of the proposal you wrote last Thursday but naturally each rewrite has over written the last one on your computer. Now all you have to do is to go into Bunker Backup, look at the previous backups, pick last Thursday’s date and hit ‘Restore’. Seconds later you will have got last Thursdays version back on your PC. For further details on this GoBack facility, click here.

By isolating only the changes you have made, the amount of information sent across the internet is considerably less than if the process was to resend the whole document. This keeps both the time spent on backing up and therefore the bandwidth used by your computer to send it, to a minimum.