Continuous Data Protection refers to any data backup process which automatically makes a secondary copy of data the moment any change is made, including a program installation, a file deletion, or a system corruption due to virus or hardware failure, as well as other changes. Continuous data protection (CDP) gives users a recovery point for the most recent working system configuration, preventing the unnecessary loss of important changes that may have occurred before a data loss event. Quite often, many additional recovery points are stored as well, creating valuable virtual "snapshots" of a system configuration through time.
The advantage of CDP as a feature of any backup system is due to the fact that backup is incrementally performed as changes are made, a system restore can take only minutes or seconds to perform, instead of hours, days or weeks. The ability to restore lost systems and files is critical, as backup window downtime can cost businesses the ability to carry on core business operations. CDP minimizes downtime from a data restore procedure. CDP as a feature offers the
maximum granularity possible for any data backup system.
Disk-to-disk backup systems offer the most reliable CDP, as changes are instantly copied directly to secondary storage on hard disk. When combined with remote backup, which writes backup data to disk at an offsite
data center facility via IP-WAN, CDP gives backup administrators the most complete protection from data loss currently available, allowing them to resume their business operations with minimal impact from the loss & restore of data.
