Incremental forever is a backup strategy in which only a single master or full backup is needed; after that incremental backups are performed "forever" and the backup appliance keeps track of those incremental backups in a manner that allows the user to recover quickly and easily.

The user benefits of the technology are

• An improved RPO (Recovery Point Objective) through near-CDP (Continuous Data Protection) backup snapshot protection. We offer flexible scheduling of incremental backup as often as every 15 minutes.

• Shorter backup windows since a master or full backup is needed only once.

• Improved network efficiency since after the first master or full backup only incremental backups are needed - no additional master or full backups or differential backups are required

The underlying technology that makes this possible are synthetic backups and point-in-time restores. Unitrends has created a unique automatic synthetic backup creation technology that supports completely automated synthetics with no user involvement and no impact on RTO (Recovery Time Objective.) Point-in-time restores means that the user is abstracted from the actual backup and only needs to specify the point in time from which to recover.

Unitrends supports incremental forever for both Linux and Windows servers and desktops (Windows Server 2003 and later).