What is the value of having a disk image versus files/folders backup?

[davidkillingswo]

Hello,

I have a full image backup defined as well as file/folder backups for important folders.

I've realized a couple of things:

1) I can restore individual files/folders from the image based backups (restore points).

2) file/folder backups do not support offsite.

What is the benefit of having one or the other.  It seems like to me that the image based backups are pretty large every night, is there such thing as incremental image based backups?

[criley]

I would always recommend volume-level backups over file/folder backups.

And yes, you can do incremental backups for entire volumes. The default setting (recovery point set) for volume-level backups will do full+incrementals.

I would only use file/folder level backups for small chunks of data (i.e. 'My Documents').