Free Clonezilla Alternative for Incremental Backup in Windows 11/10
Can you use Clonezilla for incremental backup?
Clonezilla is an open source software that you can use for disk imaging and disk cloning. It provides Clonezilla Live, a bootable media that allows you to clone or backup without loading your operating system (OS). In case of any unexpected damages that may happen to your data, many people choose Clonezilla to create backups regularly and repeatedly.
However, Clonezilla can only do full backup, and incremental backup or differential backup is currently not available for Clonezilla. Full backups are convenient for recovery, but these many versions of backup take a lot of space. If you want to keep your data regularly backed up while saving space, you can perform incremental backup or differential backup. What’s more, doing incremental backup or differential backup is much faster than doing full backup. In this case, you need another freeware to do scheduled incremental backup.
Clonezilla alternative software - Qiling Disk Master
As Clonezilla alternaitve, Qiling Disk Master Standard provides easy-to-use backup and clone features. For backup and recovery, it can create scheduled incremental backup to any locations shown in My Computer including external hard drive and NAS, and the options include File Backup, Partition Backup, System Backup and Disk Backup.
As we know, incremental backup is based on the last backup. If you delete any of the previous incremental backup, you will have no backups available for recovery. The solution of Qiling Disk Master is to automatically create a full backup before deleting any incremental backup.
Once you've created a backup, you can recovery your computer even when it is unbootable with a bootable media. Additionally, you can also restore system to another computer regardless of its hardware or firmware. As for clone, Qiling Disk Master is capable of cloning large disk to a small one. Downlod the freeware to have a try:
How to create incremental backups with Qiling Disk Master
To set up an incremental backup is very simple with incremental backup software Qiling Disk Master. You can create once incremental backup after a full backup or schedule a regular incremental backup task.
Step-by-step to create an automatic incremental backup:
1. Open the software, select Backup on the left pane. Choose File Backup as an example to back up files & folders.
2. Choose Add Folders or Add Files accordingly to select the data you want to back up.
3. Specify a destination to store the backup. You can expand the drop-down menu to Select a network location or Select a cloud drive as you need.
4. To create an automatic incremental backup, click Schedule Backup to set up a schedule, it will run in incremental mode by default. Optionally, you can also manage Options and create a retention policy in Backup Scheme before Proceed.
👉Schedule Backup: General options include Daily/Weekly/Monthly. You can further set up the specific time, intervals, or choose to perform scheduled full backup. In Qiling Disk Master Professional or higher editions, you will enjoy the options of Event triggers/USB plug in.
👉Backup Scheme: Set up a rule to retain certain number of backups and automatically delete older backups. It’s a powerful function to save your storage space and available in Professional or higher editions. Optionally, you can also choose scheduled differential backup (supported by Pro edition) instead of incremental backup here.
👉Options: Manage backup comments, email notification, compression level and image splitting, etc.
*If you simply want to perform an one-time incremental backup instead of scheduled incremental backup, then you don't need to set up the backup schedule, just find any backup task you created before in the main interface, choose Backup -> Incremental Backup to run it once.
What's more
Besides incremental backup, this Clonezilla alternative also enables you to perform one-time or scheduled differential backup. Generally speaking, incremental backs up only changed data based on the latest backup (either full backup or incremental backup), while differential is based on the last full backup.
That is, you'll need the last full backup plus all the subsequent backups to restore an incremental backup; the last full backup and the subsequent backup of a specific date to restore a differential backup.
Here’s an intuitive comparison among the 3 backup types (full, incremental, differential):
| Full Backup | Differential Backup | Incremental Backup | |
| Backup Speed | Slowest | Moderate | Fastest |
| Storage Space | Most | Moderate | Least |
| Restoration Speed | Fastest | Moderate | Slowest |
According to your needs, you can upgrade to Professional edition to enjoy the differential backup features.
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