Create incremental backups with Acronis True Image (Cyber ​​Protect Home Office) to save disk space

3. Create an incremental backup of your computer (subsequent backups)

Once the full backup is created, the following backups created via Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) will be incremental backups (to save disk space).
For testing, we added 2 files to our "Downloads" folder.

In Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image), simply click the "Backup" button.

Please wait while your computer is being backed up.
If you look at the amount of data that Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) is backing up, you will easily see that only new and existing files will be backed up.
This means that Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) will create an incremental backup this time.

Once the incremental backup is created, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) will validate it (if you enabled the validation option in step 1 of this tutorial).

Once the backup validation is complete, the message "The backup is valid" will appear.

In the "Activity" tab, you will be able to see that Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) has created an incremental backup.
As expected, the amount of data backed up corresponds to the amount of data you have added and/or modified on your computer.

If you look at the contents of your external hard drive, you will notice that there is still a single ".tibx" file, but its size has increased.
In our case, our backup file "INFORMATIWEB-PC.tibx" now weighs 25.1 GB instead of 17.6 GB.

If you double click on this ".tibx" backup file again, you will see that it now contains 2 backups.
In our case:

• Backup Fri, Jul 05 24 18:44:36 INFORMATIWEB-PC: the 1st backup of our computer whose backup type is therefore "Full".
• Backup Fri, Jul 05 24 18:44:36 INFORMATIWEB-PC: the 2nd backup of our computer whose backup type is therefore "Incremental".
  This is the backup you have just created.

If you double-click on this new backup (which is of the incremental type), you will notice that all the partitions of your disk appear again.
Although you probably haven't changed anything in the Windows system partitions.
To better understand this phenomenon, go to a folder in this backup where you have added files since the previous backup.

As we told you before, in our case, we had added 2 additional files in our "Downloads" folder.
However, although Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) created an incremental backup, Acronis shows you all the files that were available in the desired folder at the desired date/time.
So, in our case, in this incremental backup, we have access to our 2 new files (highlighted in blue in the image below), as well as the other files that were already present before the backup and that were also not deleted before this incremental backup.
So some data may appear virtually in different backups, although this data is only stored once on your external hard drive (to save disk space).

4. Create a 2nd incremental backup of your computer

Since at least one full backup has already been created for your computer, you can create an incremental backup again very easily.
For testing, we added 2 large files to our "Downloads" folder again.

Now, in the "Backup" section of Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image), click "Backup" again.

Please wait while the backup is being performed.
As expected, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) backs up only new data that you have added to your computer.

Once the backup is created and validated automatically, go to the "Activity" tab and you will see that Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) has created an incremental backup again.
Again, the "Backed up" value corresponds to the amount of data that has been backed up since the last backup.

In other words, in our case, 7.5 GB has been backed up since the last backup (yesterday at 8:23 PM).
In our case, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (True Image) has already backed up in total: 17.6 GB + 7.5 GB + 7.5 GB = 32.6 GB.

If you look on your external hard drive, again, you can see that there is only one ".tibx" file (since all incremental backups are always stored in the same file as the previous full backup).
As expected, the size of this file in our case is 32.5 GB instead of 25.1 GB just now.

If you double click on this ".tibx" file, you will see that it now contains 3 backups:

• the oldest being the 1st backup made (whose type is therefore "Full").
• the following backups made (whose type is therefore "Incremental").

As expected, if we go into the "Downloads" folder of our last backup, we find the 2 new files added just before the creation of this new backup.