3 Steps to Perform Incremental Backup External Hard Drive Easily

Nowadays, whenever the best backup method for external hard drives is mentioned, incremental backup is the first to be chosen by the masses. Not only because incremental external hard drive backups save time and storage by copying only new or changed files, reduce data loss risk, and extend drive lifespan, but also it simplify data recovery.

Best free incremental backup software for external hard drive

First of all, to perform incremental backup external drive easily, you need reliable backup software to help you. AOMEI Backupper Standard is a good choice. It allows you to perform a full backup and incremental backup totally free and it runs well with all editions of Windows including Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10/11. 

For more useful features, you need to download the free version of AOMEI Backupper and explore it yourself when you create an external hard drive incremental backup: 

AOMEI Backupper

Easy Free Incremental Backup Software

• Automatic incremental backup external drive daily, weekly, or monthly.

• Save much disk space by normal compressional, automatic splitting, and intelligent sector backup.

• Allows you to create a boot repair USB to boot your computer if it fails.

• Clone external hard drive to another one, simplified version of backup and restore.

Download Freeware
Windows 11/10/8.1/8/7

100% Secure

How to incremental backup external hard drive step by step 

Next, let's focus on how to use AOMEI Backupper to perform incremental backups of external hard drives.

Step 1. Launch AOMEI Backupper Standard Edition. Select “Disk Backup” under the “Backup” tab.

Step 2. Name the task to clearly distinguish from others. Then, select the external hard drive you want to do an incremental backup and the destination path. 

Step 3. Click “Schedule Backup" and select a backup frequency in it. Then, go to Backup Scheme, you will see the Incremental Backup is selected by default, just click OK to confirm. Then, click “Start Backup”  to perform an automatic incremental backup external hard drive.

Besides Incremental backup, you can still backup only changes with Differential Backup. It's much easy for recovery because it only requires one full backup plus any differential backup. The latest differential backup will include all changes since the last full backup. For differences between, check: incremental or differential backup.

Although incremental backup or differential backup external hard drive only includes changes, the backup disk may still be fulfilled due to accumulated backups. To avoid this problem completely, the most effective way is to enable automatic backup cleanup and delete old backup automatically with one of the cleanup methods. You have 3 options, namely, By quantity, By time, By daily/weekly/monthly. And you need to upgrade now before using it. 

The need to perform incremental backup for external hard drive

Reading here, many people may be curious about why we need to perform incremental backups for the external hard drive. Next, let's discuss the necessity of external hard drive incremental backup to determine whether the user needs to do this or not.

As we know, most files on your external hard drive never or rarely change, so an incremental backup will make a much smaller image file with backing up only changed data, which occupies smaller disk space and takes less time to finish the backup job.

For instance, a full backup is about 50 gigabytes, while the incremental backups vary from 2.5 gigabytes to around 10. And the backup time is less accordingly which depends on the changes of your drive that day.

But, you should be skillful in using incremental backups, because all the incremental backups must be available to perform a restore of a point in time due to its feature.

For example, you make an automatic PC backup setting to do a monthly full backup and a daily incremental. When you want to restore your computer to a point in time 7 days into that month, you need the initial full backup and the 6 incremental backups to reach that day. Each incremental backup should be restored “on top of” the backup prior to it until the last has been processed.

Full backup VS incremental backup of external hard drive

An incremental backup of an external hard drive includes only changed files since the last backup, which is so different from a full backup that copies all sector data of your hard drive.

Full backups should only be done weekly or monthly to back up major changes such as OS upgrades or software installation.

However, an incremental backup should be done daily to make an image of daily changed information (those small files will be accumulated as a big one sooner or later) in order to avoid data loss during long intervals between full backups. And this is a wise backup solution.

AOMEI Backupper VS Windows Backup Tool

When it comes to incremental backup of an external hard drive, some people may wonder: Which one is smarter and more prominent, AOMEI Backupper or Windows Backup Tool? Let's see the results in 4 aspects:

1. Incremental Backup Process

AOMEI Backupper: This software allows users to perform incremental backups efficiently by only saving changes made since the last backup. This not only saves storage space but also reduces backup time.

Windows Backup Tool: While it supports incremental backups, users often find it less intuitive and some errors like error codes 0x81000033, and 0x8100002F often interrupt the process.

2. Flexibility and Options

AOMEI Backupper: Offers a range of backup options, including full, incremental, and differential backups. Users can also choose specific files and folders to back up, giving them greater control over their data.

Windows Backup Tool: While it provides basic backup options, it lacks the same level of flexibility and customization.

3. Backup Scheduling

AOMEI Backupper: Allows users to set up automatic backup schedules, making it easy to maintain regular backups without manual intervention.

Windows Backup Tool: Scheduling is available, but is less robust and customizable compared to AOMEI.

4. Additional Features

AOMEI Backupper: Includes advanced features like file syncing, disk cloning, and support for various storage devices. These additional functionalities make it a more versatile tool for comprehensive data management.

Windows Backup Tool: Primarily focuses on backup and restore functions, lacking the broader functionality.

Hence, get AOMEI Backupper to protect your data from now on. Click the following links to get this awesome incremental backup freeware.

Summary

You can easily perform incremental backup for external hard drive with the help of reliable backup software - AOMEI Backupper Standard. And you can still backup external drive automatically with daily, weekly, and monthly, so as to keep all the changes since the last backup. Note single incremental backup only backup changes made in the last backup, not inlcude later changes.

Also, you can make full use of its other features, such as, differential backup, automatic backup cleanup, etc, to further improve the backup efficiency or resolve all the potential problems for backup, for example, backup disk full. And it's even work better when you want to backup system disk, and provides you with different methods, namely using Disk Backup and Disk Clone. Believe me, it's worth-trying!