With an incremental backup not all files will be saved every time the backup runs, but only the files which have changed since the last backup. This has the great advantage that the incremental backup will usually include much fewer files than a full backup and therefore will be finished in a much shorter time.

This works as follows: In the profile, you define an interval (in days) for the full backup. e.g. when you define 5 days, then KBackup will do a full backup of all files every 5 days. Whenever you start KBackup before the interval expires with this profile - regardless how often you run a backup - only the files which have changed since the last backup will be saved. KBackup stores the time stamp of the last backup into the profile and knows therefore what to do when running the next time.

The archive slice files created during an incremental backup will contain the text “_inc”, e.g.:

backup_2010.06.14-18.50.26_1_inc.tar

Full backup slice files will not include “_inc” in the name, e.g.:

backup_2010.06.13-20.58.14_1.tar

When one wants to restore files from an incremental backup, it's important to look for the most recent version of a file to be restored in all “_inc” files and finally also the last full backup slice file. This exactly is also the disadvantage of the incremental backup (but no advantage without disadvantage ;-) )

If you want to do a full backup earlier than the defined incremental cycle time defined in a profile, you can do so by checking the Force Full Backup option in the user interface. When KBackup is started via the command line, this can be achieved by using the option --forceFull

A forced full backup will restart the backup cycle, i.e. KBackup counts the days to the next full backup from the time of the last full backup.