Using only incremental backups means your business saves just the changes made since the last backup, rather than copying all your data every time. While this approach can save storage space and reduce backup time, relying solely on incremental backups can create risks when it comes to restoring your data quickly and completely.
Why this matters for Canadian SMBs
For a small or mid-sized Canadian business, data loss or prolonged downtime can disrupt operations, erode customer trust, and even lead to regulatory headaches if personal information is involved. Incremental backups depend on a chain of previous backups to restore data. If one link in that chain is missing or corrupted, recovering your files becomes difficult or impossible. This risk can increase your recovery time after events like ransomware attacks, hardware failures, or accidental deletions.
A practical scenario
Consider a 50-employee Toronto-based marketing firm that runs daily incremental backups to save bandwidth and storage costs. One day, a ransomware infection encrypts their files. When they try to restore from backups, they discover that one incremental backup was corrupted and unusable. Because they had no recent full backup, their IT provider had to spend extra time piecing together data from older backups, extending downtime and delaying client projects. A better strategy would have combined regular full backups with incremental ones, ensuring a reliable restore point.
What to ask your IT provider
- Do you perform regular full backups in addition to incremental backups? How often?
- How do you verify the integrity of backup files to prevent corruption?
- What is the estimated recovery time objective (RTO) using our current backup setup?
- Are backups stored offsite or in the cloud to protect against physical disasters?
- Can we test our backups periodically to ensure data can be restored successfully?
Simple checks you can do internally
- Confirm where backups are stored and whether they are protected by encryption and access controls.
- Review backup schedules and retention policies to ensure full backups occur regularly (e.g., weekly).
- Ask staff if they have experienced any recent data loss or delays in recovery.
- Check if backup reports or alerts are reviewed and acted on promptly.
Incremental backups are a valuable part of a balanced backup strategy but should not be the only method used. Combining full, incremental, and sometimes differential backups helps ensure your business can recover quickly and completely from data loss events.
To safeguard your data effectively, talk with a trusted managed IT provider or IT advisor who understands your business needs and can design a backup and disaster recovery plan that balances speed, cost, and reliability without unnecessary complexity.