By Ben Puzzuoli, Director Sales & Marketing at DataDepositBox
December 14, 2015

Data Deposit Box Cloud Backup Expert Tips: Why Continuous Data Protection is Important

Continuous Data Protection (CDP) and real time backup are terms that are often thrown about in the backup market. What do these really mean and how are you actually protected?

These terms refer to storage systems that monitor any changes to files and then backup those changes as they are being generated. What’s nice about this is that the moment there is a change in the content of a file or folder, you can be assured that there is another copy, in another location, available to be restored in case you need it. If you are a small-to medium sized business, these service offerings free you from backup concerns and let you pay attention to the bottom line.

Some cloud backup vendors that offer CDP use Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). While this is extremely useful for detection, scheduling and managing snapshots, there are other technologies that provide the same facility with much greater analytics and insight.

If you are concerned about capturing a close-to-real-time copy of your data, then CDP delivers value. Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) are automatic to the process. An application database can be recovered to a point closest to the point of failure. CDP creates electronic journals with complete storage snapshots with one snapshot for every change in data or at some specified time interval. Every transaction and every detail can be automatically and continuously preserved as a part of the ongoing process of backup.

CDP or near-CDP snapshots shouldn’t have a big performance impact as they interrupt operations only momentarily and just use up only as much disk space as required to track changed blocks. This is a great advantage when compared to write I/Os of high performance applications that slow down performance while writes are being done. I/O write processes may also require high performance Fiber Channels to be installed or SAS disk drives and storage systems to give optimum performance.

CDP allows administrators to schedule snapshots for different servers at different intervals and also recover each server snapshot independent of other servers. While there is no theoretical limit to the amount of snapshots you can store, CDP can typically retain up to 256 snapshots subject to constraints imposed by the operating system and the storage system. Most enterprise systems delete snapshots that are thirty days old and resource intense, high performance enterprises don’t keep snapshots that are more than a few days old. Such snapshots can be transferred to archives or other media if there is a need to retain them for longer periods. CDP can also be synchronized with cloud backup servers or replication servers so that write operations to the online backup server happen continuously in the background as a near continuous backup process.

CDP can be seamlessly integrated with any kind of transaction application such as Oracle, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft SharePoint. Snapshots can be used to fully recover the application and database administrators can replay transaction logs for complete recovery. While CDP facilitates recovery of small amounts or large amounts of data instantaneously, the time frame to complete recovery is determined by the volume of data to be recovered.

Data Deposit Box was the first cloud backup provider to introduce a Patented Continuous Backup technology. Every day, over 200,000 users are free from the need to schedule backups and worry about their success or failure. Automatic backups occur unobtrusively in the background with the latest changes preserved with the necessary time stamps and versioning. And if they ever need to recover data, its simple to restore, wherever they are. It’s that easy!

About the Author: Ben Puzzuoli is Director of Sales & Marketing at DataDepositBox, a Toronto based cloud data backup service provider, which is listed at both the Toronto and Frankfurt Stock Exchanges. DataDepositBox technologies and solutions are currently used daily by over 200,000 customers, 1,000 resellers, 25 MSPs and private label partners for online backup and recovery, archiving, disaster readiness, secure file sharing and remote access. Visit DDB website here: www.DataDepositBox.com

 

 

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