Techniques for producing incremental short-term backups while minimizing media access are described herein. A backup request is received that specifies data to backup and a schedule for that backup. The data is then partitioned based on the schedule and, for each of the partitions, it is determined whether to store a full or incremental backup of that partition. Each partition is fully backed up once during a cycle of backups and incrementally backed up at other times. With each full backup of a partition, a reverse delta that can be used to reconstruct the previous full backup for that partition is stored with the full backup.