If a volume has at least one full backup, you can use the Block Storage backup service to create an incremental backup. Incremental backups store only the changes made since the last backup.

Full backups are easier to manage but they can become resource intensive when the size of the volume increases over time. With incremental backups, you can capture periodic changes to volumes and minimize your resource usage.

Incremental backups increase the administrative overhead required for managing your backups. For example, you cannot delete a full backup if it already has one or more incremental backups, you can only delete the latest incremental backup.

Incremental backups have a lower performance than full backups: When you create an incremental backup, all of the data in the volume must first be read and compared with the data in both the full backup and each subsequent incremental backup.