When you back up your website, you're really choosing between two approaches: a full backup, which copies everything every time, or an incremental backup, which only copies what changed since the last backup. Which one is right for you depends on how large your site is, how often it changes, and how much storage space your hosting plan gives you.
What Is a Full Backup?
A full backup is a complete snapshot of your website at one point in time: your files, your database, and (depending on the tool) your email accounts and account settings, all bundled into one archive.
- Restoring is simple. You have one file that contains everything, so there's no piecing anything together.
- Each backup takes the same amount of storage and time to generate, no matter how little actually changed since the last one.
- For a large site with lots of images, videos, or a big database, repeated full backups can use up disk space and bandwidth quickly.
What Is an Incremental Backup?
An incremental backup starts with one full backup, and every backup after that only captures the files and database changes made since the previous backup, not the whole site again.
- It uses far less storage and takes less time to run, especially for large sites that don't change dramatically between backups.
- Restoring is slightly more involved: you (or your restore tool) need the original full backup plus every incremental backup after it, applied in order.
- If one increment in that chain is missing or corrupted, restoring to a point after it becomes difficult.
Which Should You Choose?
For most small business websites on shared hosting, a full backup taken on a regular schedule (daily or weekly) is the simplest and most reliable option, and it's what most hosting control panel backup tools are built around.
Incremental backups make more sense once your site is large enough, or changes often enough, that full backups start straining your storage quota or taking a long time to complete. This is common for:
- Online stores with frequently updated product catalogs and order data.
- Content-heavy sites or blogs with a large, growing media library.
- Sites where you need more frequent backups (several times a day) but can't afford the storage cost of a full copy each time.
If your site fits this description, look for a backup plugin (for a WordPress site) or a dedicated backup service that specifically supports incremental backups, since not every built-in hosting backup tool offers this mode.
Whichever approach you use, keep at least one backup copy stored somewhere other than your hosting account, such as downloaded to your computer or saved to a separate cloud storage service. A backup that only lives on the same server as your website won't help if that server has a problem.
If you'd rather not think about backup schedules at all, you can set up automatic scheduled backups for your website so a fresh copy is taken regularly without any manual steps.