how can I do incremental backups using DISM in Windows 10?

Question

How can I do incremental backups of folders using dism tool in Windows 10?

Using dism one can create wim images from folders.

dism /Capture-Image /ImageFile:D:\MyFolder.wim /CaptureDir:C:\MyFolder /Name:”My Folder  /compress:fast

However, imagine that the folder is a huge one and we have only change a portion of that folder, therefore imaging the whole folder would be useless. I know of other backup software. Considering my current situation, the only option for me is using dism. Please don't tell me that it is not a good choice. If you know how we can do incremental backups using dism, just give the required arguments please. By incremental backups, we mean to only backup and write the changed parts of that folder into maybe another wim file beside the previously made wim file.

Thanks

Answer 1

From DISM Image Management Command-Line Options that you are looking for this parameter of DISM:

/Append-Image

Adds an additional image to a .wim file. /Append-Image compares new files to the resources in the existing .wim file specified by the /ImageFile argument, and stores only a single copy of each unique file so that each file is only captured once. The .wim file can have only one assigned compression type. Therefore, you can only append files with the same compression type.

Syntax:

DISM.exe /Append-Image /ImageFile:<path_to_image_file> /CaptureDir:<source_directory> /Name:<image_name>

[/Description:] [/ConfigFile:] [/Bootable] /WIMBoot [/CheckIntegrity] [/Verify] [/NoRpFix]

Another useful parameter is /Capture-CustomImage:

Captures the incremental file changes based on the specific install.wim file to a new file, custom.wim for a WIMBoot image.

Answer 2

@harrymc You should mention-- you need to create an initial image of the folder to begin with. Same command but without the /append-image parameter. After that, each time you /append-image it will only add the new or changed files and put internal pointers to any duplicates. This is actually a differential backup, but is better in that you only need to apply (i.e. restore) a single image, or you can mount it and read or write to the full image, no juggling. The successive images are stored one after the other and referenced by index number. The index number is incremented each time you append an image, but it is properly considered a differential backup, not an incremental backup. So you only need to access the indexed image you want and it will give you back an accurate copy of the enitire backup you made at that point, not just the changes. All in one image file, but compressed in the sense there is no duplication of data in terms of files.