Incremental backup question

[jstav]

Hi,

I've got a little bit of an odd use case here, and wanted to get clarification on something (and perhaps request a feature). We deploy a number of computers here, and they all start with the same base OS image (Win 10 IoT Ent). Then we customize them and some months later we want to back them all up again.

In the past we've used the IFL incremental mode to help us do this by first taking a full backup of the first PC, and then just taking incremental backups of the other computers (as all PC's should have more or less the same files on them) based on the first PC. This has worked well in the past, but recently we've started installing windows OS updates between the initial base OS installation and trying to take the incremental backup. This seems to be leading to a much larger incremental image (4GB vs 1GB).

So my question is, how does the incremental backup option tell whether a file has changed? It appears to me that it somehow uses the file times in determining this, and not just the bytes contained in the file itself, is this correct? The windows update file times seem to be the update installation time, and so don't match between the two systems and thus the incremental backup file includes a second copy of the contents of all those files as well (which of course for the same window update contains identical bytes). Is there any option to match the byte data in a file for an incremental backup to determine if it has changed and not the file times? If no, could there be?

Thanks,
Jay

[TeraByte Support]

It's not file based, but contact terabyte support directly at support@ email address.