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Continuous Backup Methods and CDP Data Backup Emulation

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Continuous backup immediately creates a copy of any changed data, instead of scheduling or forcing regular backups by a period or by an external event. It can be time- and resource-consuming, although it provides immediate protection for any data changes.

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The Theory of Continuous Data Protection Backup

Continuous data backup (CDP backup) requires special software solutions capable to react on every change in the protected dataset. The best continuous data protection backup software must support any data types existed, as well as full spectrum of backup options and functions.

Requirements for Continuous Data Protection Backup Solutions

Unlike traditional approaches, continuous data protection requires much more disk space and system resources for excellent and smooth job.

In network-based backup systems, bandwidth usage caused by the operations can seriously slow down LAN performance.

The disk subsystem must also provide a sufficient speed for undertaking many extra operations required for controlling datasets in real time.

Requirements for Continuous Data Protection Backup Solutions

Nonetheless, regardless of its price and technical difficulties, CDP software for continuous backups are usually worth the investments – especially when you need to safeguard enterprise servers that manage critical business data.

Continuous Data Protection vs. Scheduling

By using CDP backup software, you can trace any data changes. In other hand, scheduling tasks by time allows you almost the same backup functions, especially in conjunction with differential or mixed (full/differential) backup methods.

Example: You can schedule your database backup with Handy Backup, giving a task the running period roughly equal to time of significant changing this database. If you set up a differential backup, you can be sure that you are always have a fresh copy of your data.

Properly tuned scheduled backups can add to data protection as much as (or even more than) continuous data backup solutions, with a significantly smaller amount of resources consumed. Still, there are the situations when you will need a consistent CDP enterprise backup.

A Short Guide for Substituting CDP with Scheduled Backup

When choosing between continuous and scheduled backups, you should also take into account the following points:

File-level incremental backup. While continuous backup automatically copies any changes, a scheduled backup usually saves complete files. This makes data recovery much faster and simpler, due to file consistency.
Differential backup. With scheduled backups, you often create differential backups, i.e. save changes made since the latest full backup, which means that restoration requires you to have only two backup datasets: full and last differential.
Media rotation. Unlike continuous backups that always use one storage, scheduled backups allow different backup rotation plans, i.e. combining online backup for substituting a continuous data protection with more frequent backups to local drives.

We welcome you to download our software and try scheduled and near-continuous backups today!

Continuous Backups vs. RAID and Mirroring

It is important to understand the difference between continuous backup and different types of replication, especially creating RAID systems with data redundancy and mirroring your data to some different location.

RAID Is a Continuous Data Protection

The main function of redundant RAID configurations is to protect data from failures, not from attacks. A redundant RAID configuration, such as RAID1 or RAID10, creates a “mockup” of continuous backup, only because it cannot separate original data from a backup set.

RAID Is Not a Backup!

A RAID system mirrors its data modifications in real time, and there is almost no way (excluding backup itself) to roll back to previous versions of files. If a virus corrupts your data, the same thing will immediately happen to all copies, and there will be no way to undo the changes.