Your organization follows a backup policy that performs a full backup every Sunday at 01:00 and an incremental backup at 01:00 on every other day of the week. At 15:30 on Thursday a critical file server fails and must be restored to its most recent state. Which backup set(s) must be restored - and in what order - to complete the recovery?
The Sunday full backup, followed by the incremental backups from Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in chronological order.
The Sunday full backup and the Thursday incremental backup.
The Sunday full backup, followed by the incremental backups from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday in chronological order.
An incremental backup saves only the data that has changed since the last backup of any type (full or incremental). To perform a complete restore from an incremental backup chain, you must start with the last full backup and then apply every subsequent incremental backup in the order they were created until the point of recovery. In this scenario, the server fails on Thursday afternoon. The backups available are the full backup from Sunday, and the incremental backups from Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Therefore, the correct restore procedure is to first restore the Sunday full backup, and then apply the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday incremental backups in chronological order. Skipping any incremental backup in the sequence would result in an incomplete data set and data loss.