Incremental Refresh vs Full Refresh vs Rebuild
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Incremental Refresh
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An incremental refresh scans and re-indexes content and permissions only for documents identified by the repository as new, modified, or deleted since the last rebuild, full refresh, or incremental refresh.
Whenever available, schedule incremental refreshes at short intervals to constantly and efficiently maintain your source up-to-date with the repository content (see Scheduling a Source Incremental Refresh).
Note: The incremental refresh of some source types may have some limitations (often due to repository API limitations). Refer to the appropriate Coveo connector documentation for details.
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Full Refresh
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A full refresh re-scans all documents from the repository. It re-indexes the permissions of all documents and re-indexes the content only for the ones that are found to be new, modified, or deleted since the last rebuild, full refresh, or incremental refresh.
When incremental refresh is not available or has some limitations, or as a safety net, schedule full refreshes at appropriate intervals to maintain your source up-to-date with the repository content (see Scheduling Source Refresh Actions).
Note: The full refresh of the Web Page connector does not catch deleted pages. A rebuild is necessary to eliminate deleted web pages from the index.
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Rebuild
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A rebuild completely re-indexes the content and permissions of all the documents from the repository, even those that have not been modified since the last indexing date.
You must rebuild a source when you change its configuration. For large sources, plan your changes to minimize the number of rebuilds and the impact of the Coveo server resources (see Applying an Action to a Collection or a Source).
Apart from cases where a full refresh cannot fully keep a source up-to-date with the repository content, it is not recommended to schedule rebuilds, particularly for large sources.