When the chain of incremental backups in an archive becomes long, conversion of an incremental backup to a full one increases the reliability of your archive. You may also want to convert a differential backup if there are incremental backups that depend on it.
During the conversion, the selected incremental or differential backup is replaced with a full backup for the same point in time. The previous backups in the chain are not changed. All subsequent incremental and differential backups up to the nearest full backup are also updated. The new backup versions are created first and only after that are the old ones deleted. Therefore, the location must have enough space to temporarily store both the old and the new versions.
Example
You have the following backup chain in your archive:
F1 I2 I3 I4 D5 I6 I7 I8 F9 I10 I11 D12 F13
Here F means full backup, I -incremental, D - differential.
You convert to full the I4 backup. The I4, D5, I6, I7, I8 backups will be updated, while I10 I11 D12 will remain unchanged, because they depend on F9.
Tips on usage
Conversion does not create a copy of a backup. To obtain a self-sufficient copy of the backup on a flash drive or removable media, use the export operation.
Conversion is not allowed for backups stored on tapes and CD/DVD.
When you mount an image in the read/write mode, the software creates an incremental backup containing the changes you make to the backup content. The subsequent backups do not contain these changes. Naturally, if you convert any of the subsequent backups to full, none of these changes will appear in the resulting full backup.