When adding or editing backup tasks, the task details window is opened. The first active panel on that form is always the "Task Name & Type".
After giving a descriptive name to your backup task, you can select the backup type.
The program can make different kind of backups:
| 1. | Full Backup. With full backups all files (from folders you have pointed out) are included to the backup. In case you need to restore your data, you will find everything in one backup file. |
| 2. | Incremental backup. With incremental backups, only modified or added files are backed up, compared to the last backup. When making incremental backups, you end up with a lot of small backup files. To restore some particular file, you have to find the latest backup of that file. To restore everything, you have to restore the first backup, then the second backup, then the third backup, etc... It can be time consuming work if you change your files often. The advantage of incremental backups is that it takes much less time to make an incremental backup (as usually you change only some files), and backup files will take less room on your storage media (Hard drive, CD or DVD). |
| 3. | Incremental + Full. This backup type removes the inconvenience of incremental backups. It will make a number (set in this same panel) of incremental backups, and after that a full backup. After the full backup is created, the incremental backup is created next time again. When restoring your data, you will have to restore the full backup, and only few smaller incremental backups. At the same time, making incremental backups is fast and they take much less room compared to full backups. |
| 4. | Differential backup. With differential backups, only modified and added files are backed up, compared to the last full backup. Similar to incremental backups, the backups are smaller and faster to create. To restore everything (or a single file), you have to restore only 2 files - the first (full) backup (containing all your files) and the latest (differential) backup. |
| 5. | Differential + Full. This backup type will make a number (set on this same panel) of differential backups and then a full backup. Creating full backup from time to time is useful as when time goes by, the number of files that are changed since the first backup increases. So does the time it takes to make the differential backup and the size it has. That's why it is important to make full backups from time to time. If you make a full backup each week, the backup size and the time it takes to create it is probably much smaller than for the differential backup where the last full backup was created months ago. |
| 7. | Inverse. Inverse backup type will back up files that are unchanged since the last backup. |
Next you can do on this panel is to limit the number of recent backups from this task. This option is available only for full backups and types combined with full backups. Once this limit is reached, older backups are deleted automatically. That way you can be sure you will not run out of free disk space. And at the same time, you have a number of recent versions from your valuable work. If you want to keep all the backups, just uncheck this option. This setting affects also files on the FTP server (if uploading is activated), but not CD and DVD discs. CD and DVD discs are not affected as in most cases files can not be deleted from discs once they are burned.
The program can also make an executable backup file. In that case, the backup file isn't a ZIP archive file, but application file that you can execute like any other program. It contains both your data that was backed up, and the integrated Restoring Wizard. So to restore your data, you don't need to anything except the backup file itself (you don't need even TK8 Backup itself). You can run the file, and restore the data you need. To make your backups executable, check the option on this panel.
There are some drawbacks using executable backups, though. The most important is that as the file is an application file, it is much more open to file corruptions and virus attacks than other "normal" archived files. It is possible that your backup (in this case application) is corrupted for the time you need to restore your data. If that happens, you can't execute the file and accessing your data is impossible. If the backup would be a normal archive (zip file), there are ways to fix ZIP archives, even if something should corrupt them. Another problem with executable backups is that if the backup file is large, then to run this application, it has to be loaded into your computer memory. If you don't have enough memory (at least as much as large is the backup), restoring such backups can be time consuming. So you have to calculate the risk before making executable backups.
You can use additional option for full backups. If you don't want to create another backup file from your data if the data isn't changed since the last backup, just activate the option "Make only if there are changed or new files compared to the last backup".
In the Professional version you can additionally select the group for the current backup task (if groups are activated from the Program Options). Grouping can be useful if you have a lot of backup tasks to manage. To select a group for your task, just select it from the drop-down list. To add or edit available group names, click the "Edit list" button at right of the drop-down list.