Database Differential Backup

What is differential backup?

A differential backup is a cumulative backup of all changes made since the last full backup.

The recovery is faster but the backup is slower than incremental backup. The backup is faster but the recovery is lower than full backup. The storage space requirements are lower than full backup but?higher than incremental backup.

In the image below you can see an example on how a backup job running four times would look like when using differential backup:

It only requires the last full backup and the last differential backup to restore the entire database.

Click here to read more about enable the binary logs for MySQL incremental / differential backup