data protection solution

Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. It allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time.

Differences to traditional backup

Continuous data protection solutions data protection is different than traditional backup in data protection solution that you don't have to specify the point in time to which you would like to recover until you are ready to perform a restore. Traditional backups can only restore data to the point at which the backup was taken. With continuous data protection, there are no backup schedules. When data is written to disk, it is also asynchronously written to a second location, usually another computer over the network. This introduces some overhead to disk-write operations but eliminates the need for nightly scheduled backups.

Some solutions may be marketed as continuous data protection, but may only let you restore to fixed intervals such data protection solutions sheet storage paper white as 1 hour ago, or 24 hours data protection solutions storage systems exagrid ago. This is not true continuous data protection.

Differences to RAID/replication/mirroring

Continuous data protection differs from RAID, replication, or mirroring in that these technologies only allow you to recover the most recent copies of data. Continuous data protection allows you to restore previous versions as well.

Backup disk size

In some situations, continuous data protection will require less space on backup media (usually disk) than traditional backup. Most continuous data protection solutions save byte-level differences rather than file-level differences. This means that if you change one byte of a 100 GB file, only the changed byte is backed up. Traditional incremental and differential backups make a copy of entire files.