The cPanel Backup system offers users the choice between processing backups as increments or compressed backups.
The decision primarily depends on your needs and server's hardware limitations in terms of disk space and, at times, resource availability.
Incremental Backups
This backup type typically only retains one backup file of the account, and only saves the information that has changed since your last backup.
Incremental backups are ideal when you're working with a backup partition using a smaller amount of disk space, as it will not maintain multiple backups for an account. Additionally, because this backup type does not usually run as long as a compressed backup type, you also save on resource consumption.
Compressed Backups
If you require multiple full backup instances of a single user, this may be the backup type to use.
Compressed backups will create a new backup of a configured account regardless of whether the account's data has changed since the last backup attempt. It's important to note that because multiple backups are stored for a single user, disk space usage tends to be a lot higher than when using incremental backups.
This also at times translates to longer backup runs, which may not be ideal depending on your server's resource limitations.
One way to work around this is to reduce the retention interval, which would allow fewer backups to be stored within the partition.
For more information on these backup types and how to configure them, you can review the below documentation: