Chapter 3. General Information; The Difference Between File Archives And Disk/Partition Images; Full, Incremental And Differential Backups - Seagate BlackArmor NAS 110 User Manual

Chapter 3. General information

3.1 The difference between file archives and disk/partition images

A backup archive is a file or a group of files (also called ―backups‖ in this guide), that
contains a copy of selected file/folder data or a copy of all information stored on selected
disks/partitions.
When you back up files and folders, only the data, along with the folder tree, is compressed
and stored.
Backing up disks and partitions is performed in a different way: Seagate BlackArmor Backup
stores a sector-by-sector snapshot of the disk, which includes the operating system, registry,
drivers, software applications and data files, as well as system areas hidden from the user.
This procedure is called ―creating a disk image,‖ and the resulting backup archive is often
called a disk/partition image.
By default, Seagate BlackArmor Backup stores only those hard disk parts that contain data
(for supported file systems). Further, it does not back up swap file information (pagefile.sys
under Windows XP/Vista) and hiberfil.sys (a file that keeps RAM contents when the
computer goes into hibernation). This reduces image size and speeds up image creation and
restoration. However, you might use the Create an image using the sector-by-sector
approach option that lets you include all of the sectors of a hard disk in an image.
A partition image includes all files and folders. This includes all attributes (including hidden
and system files), boot record, and FAT (file allocation table); as well as files in the root
directory and the zero track of the hard disk with master boot record (MBR).
A disk image includes images of all disk partitions as well as the zero track with master boot
record (MBR).
By default, files in all Seagate BlackArmor Backup archives have a ―.tib‖ extension. Do not
change this file extension.
It is important to note that you can restore files and folders not only from file archives, but
from disk/partition images too. To do so, mount the image as a virtual disk (see
Exploring archives and mounting images
specified files or folders.

3.2 Full, incremental and differential backups

Seagate BlackArmor Backup can create full, incremental and differential backups.
A full backup contains all data at the moment of backup creation. It forms a base for
further incremental or differential backup or is used as a standalone archive. A full backup
has the shortest restore time compared to incremental or differential ones.
An incremental backup file only contains data changed since the last backup of any type
(full, incremental, or differential one). Therefore, it is smaller and takes less time to create,
but as it doesn't contain all data; all the previous backups and the initial full backup are
required for restoration.
Unlike an incremental backup, when every backup procedure creates the next file in a
―chain‖, a differential backup creates an independent file, containing all changes since the
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) or start the image restoration and select Restore
Chapter 12.
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