Describe the Difference Between Full and Incremental Backups

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The Answer is Although the dump/restore utility can be used to back up only certain files and directories, it was designed to back up entire filesystems to an archive and keep track of these filesystems in a file called /etc/dumpdates. Because archiving all data on a filesystem (known as a full backup) might take a long time, you can choose to perform a full backup only on weekends and incremental backups each evening during the week. An incremental backup backs up only the data that has been changed since the last backup. In the case of a system failure, you can restore the information from the full backup and then restore the information from all subsequent incremental backups in sequential order. You can perform up to nine different incremental backups using the dump/restore utility; number 0 represents a full backup, whereas numbers 1 through 9 represent incremental backups.
Suppose, for example, that you perform a full backup of the /dev/sda3 filesystem on Sunday, perform incremental backups from Monday to Wednesday, and on Thursday the /dev/sda3 filesystem becomes corrupted. After the filesystem has been re-created, you should restore the full backup (0) followed by the first incremental backup (1), the second incremental backup (2), and the third incremental backup (3) to ensure that data has been properly recovered.

Describe the Difference Between Full and Incremental Backups

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