A drive image backup is a type of backup where an exact copy image of your hard drive is made.

This drive image is an exact replica of your hard drive and contains all your applications, files and operating system. It can be restored from our recovery disk to perform bare metal restores.

A smart backup is a backup method that focuses only on the changes that have occurred since the last backup. IvyBackup lets you create two types of smart backups; differential backups and incremental backups.

A backup test is an operation that verifies the integrity of a backup. In short, it confirms that the backup, its files and any related information is valid. A backup test avoids the situations that occur at restore time when users discover that their backups no longer work.

A full backup is a comprehensive backup method. In this method, a backup of all the files and folders in the source is made. This means that each time a backup is made, an entire copy of every file in the source is backed up.

Some advantages of full backups include:

• Backups are easy and fast to restore( minimal time to restore ) because all the backup files are bundled together in one set.
• Managing different versions of backed up data is straightforward.
• Backups have no dependencies on each other.

Some disadvantages of full backups include:

• Backups take relatively longer to create because each and every file is backed up regardless of its state in the last backup i.e. unchanged files are backed up.
• Backups require considerable storage space ( relative to the size of the source ). Because each file is backed up regardless of whether it has been modified or not. Full backups are not particularly storage space efficient.

A differential backup is a backup type where only the changes that have occurred since the last full backup are backed up.

Differential backups are more storage space efficient than full backups. However, these backups take considerably longer to restore as the underlying full backup has to be restored first.

Some advantages of differential backups include:

• Backup creation is faster than that of full backups especially if few changes have occurred.
• More storage space efficient than full backups.
• Faster backup restore time than incremental backups.

Some disadvantages of differential backups include:

• Backup creation is slower than that of incremental backups.
• Backup restores are slower than full backups.
• Backups have a dependency on the full backup they are created from. If the associated full backup is missing or corrupted, the differential backup cannot be restored.

An Incremental backup is a backup type where only the changes that have occurred since the last backup are backed up.

An incremental backup is different from a differential backup in the sense that the last backup can be of any type i.e. full, differential or even incremental.

Incremental backups offer faster backup creation and more efficient storage space utilization than either full backups or differential backups.

Some advantages of incremental backups include:

• More storage space efficient than differential or full backups.
• Backup creation is faster than that of full backups or differential backups especially if few changes have occurred.

Some disadvantages of incremental backups include:

• Restores are slower than both differential or full backups.
• Incremental backups have a high potential for creating backup dependencies. What this means is that, over time, incremental backup creation time increases especially if full or differential backups are created infrequently.

Yes you can transfer backups made on one machine to another machine. To do this, simply transfer all the backup files made on the original machine to the target machine. On the target machine, from IvyBackup’s Tools menu, select Import Backups.

Yes you can.

IvyBackup has built in support for 256 Bit AES encryption and can automatically encrypt your backups. This setting can be set on a job-by-job basis.