According to the author, "Traditional backup programs are still largely built on concepts from the days when everyone backed up their data to cheap backup media (i.e. discs or tape). They are typically designed to backup all information to a set of backup media. Even though most backup programs now allow you to back up data to external hard disks or network locations, most still create monolithic backup files. Getting to the data once it's on the backup media usually involves a restore process that moves the individual file data back to a hard disk. Nowadays however hard disks are cheap and online storage is practically getting cheaper by the minute. Backing up using a process that creates large, monolithic backup files just doesn't make as much sense anymore. Hard drives are very good as storing individual files and online backups services are most efficient when they can upload small incremental files changes rather than larger monolithic backup files. After this realization I started to look for possible alternatives to the monolithic backup process. Most of what I found offered little more than what NT Backup and some clever scripts had to offer. There were some notable exceptions and the solution I ultimately settled on is largely inspired by one of these exceptions, a tool named rsync. However once I made the decision to move away from NT Backup and a traditional, monolithic backup system things got a lot more complicated."