Data backup today is the only reasonable way to ensure the safety of valuable information stored on digital media. Disaster recovery of information from the damaged hard drive can be many times more expensive and does not guarantee full recovery of lost data. However, the main thing is that it takes far more precious time than usual restoration from the backup made previously by prudent administrator.

Backup programs offer three basic types of backup: full, incremental and differential backup. Ordinary full backup is quite resource consuming, taking at each new backup much of disk space. In turn, differential backups can store only the changes made since the last full backup and thus save up to 90% of disk space.

Each of the next differential backups contains all changes made since the full backup, so to restore you only need the last full backup and last differential. For this reason, data recovery using the differential backup takes significantly less time than restoring from incremental backups, when the program needs to go through the whole chain of backups.

Handy Backup is an award-winning software for data backup, synchronization and recovery for Windows and Windows Server environments. Using the backup program - it is the most efficient way to organize a workable backup system, a system which people really use, and which is sufficiently reliable to restore if necessary a given amount of information as soon as possible. A differential backup allows you to keep only several last backups, so that when detecting corrupted data file can always be restored.

The main scope of the differential backup is large amounts of information, which is constantly modified with small changes. Handy Backup allows administrator to make differential backup of Exchange Server daily and backup only a new correspondence, added calendar events, and other minor changes, instead of doing a full backup of the server every time. Handy Backup can also perform differential backup of variety of database management systems including MySQL, MS SQL, Oracle, DB2, Lotus Notes / Domino, and many others.

In general, the differential backup is a quite useful thing to back up any information because it helps save considerable disk space. Handy Backup software is especially helpful because it is simple to use, reliable and offers the additional options for a differential backup, such as a task scheduler, compression and encryption of backed up data, e-mail notification of completed backup operations and many other useful features.