Disaster Recovery Solution? CDP

Continuing with the last blog, disaster could hit us at any time. The question that seems to arise:

What are some solution to protecting your asset?

One of the growing trend is: Continuous Data Protection

How to Use Continuous Data Protection to Improve Backup, Disaster Recovery

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Data-Storage/How-to-Use-Continuous-Data-Protection-to-Improve-Backup-Disaster-Recovery/

As Wikipedia defines:
Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time 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. ...

In laments term, it is a CDP software or appliance that detects a change in the data, run and "capture" the data, and back up the data.

What is impressive is that CDP is chronologically "documenting" all the changes in your data. It is better than an image snapshot because it is able to continuously take snapshot of each individual data. You could edit your disaster recovery with some data at one point in time and another data set on another date.

It allows the optimal solution in backing your data and recovering your data. As the article points out:

"When used properly, CDP technology can unify local and remote data protection processes, combining replication and backup into a comprehensive solution that minimizes data loss, speeds recovery, and reduces or eliminates the need for tape-based data protection"

One the amazing application of CDP is that, it could do what they call a "bare metal recovery", you could run the CDP and create a recovery disk for a computer. Have the CDP running to save backing up the whole computer. If a computer hard drive fails, you could run the recovery disk to get it back and the use the CDP to bring the unit up to date with its data.

Some units have the capability to transfer the hard drive information from one unit to another by removing drivers with adding generic drivers onto the new unit. It is not always simple but the capability to image your hard drive to a completely different unit is amazing.