Backup Types Explained: Full, Incremental, Differential, Synthetic, and Forever-Incremental
VM backup solutions for VMware and Hyper-V environments differ in many aspects, which can be the subject of a lengthy article. In this article, we are going to touch upon only one of these aspects — backup techniques, which are generally known as backup types or methods. Below is a brief overview for each of the traditional (i.e., full backup, incremental backup, and differential backup) and newly-emerged (i.e., forever-incremental and synthetic) backup types, as well as variations thereof (i.e., mirror, reverse incremental, smart, and continuous backup), so you can see how they differ and what advantages each of them offers.
