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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction A Promising Solution: Continuous Data Protection Conclusion

A Promising Solution: Continuous Data Protection

A good solution for data recovery is continuous data protection (CDP)--a methodology that enables recovery of data from any point in the past. All CDP solutions incorporate these three fundamental attributes:

• Data modifications are continuously captured or tracked in real-time.
• All data modifications and incremental changes are stored in a separate location from the primary data.
• Recovery point objectives are arbitrary and need not be defined in advance of the actual recovery.

As more CDP solutions become available in the market, this methodology is most important to a business data recovery plan because it provides the greatest flexibility in recovering lost business data and at a higher success rate.

Using CDP, a business can pick a point in time just before the data loss was discovered and recover most, if not all, of the lost data. In addition, success of data recovery is dependant on the number of backup points the business has to select from. For example, if a business chooses to restore all data captured from ten minutes prior to the digital disaster, but that isn't good enough to recover the most up-to-date data, CDP allows the business to select another backup point closer to the incident that caused the data loss. The business has the ability to recover more current data than it would by strictly relying on a single backup made the day prior.

All in all, CDP offers a higher success rate of total data recovery, making it an optimal choice for data recovery plans.

Solving the Mobile Dilemma

Now comes the hard part. Once you have a good corporate data recovery plan in place, how do you ensure your distributed workforce is also covered?

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Mobile workers in North America have represented the majority of the workforce since 2003 and 60% of all data is held on PC Desktops and laptops.

Cost of Downtime Survey, 2001

Corporations have steadily moved critical applications and data from the mainframe to servers, and now to desktop and mobile PCs. As much as 60% of corporate data resides unprotected on PC desktops and laptops.

IDC analyst Cynthia Doyle

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There's a solution called personal disaster recovery (PDR) that lts end users or remote workers to quickly and easily recover an individual workstation, laptop or edge server without needing external IT support to do it. PDR software solutions can supplement a business's data recovery plan and provide considerable cost and time savings.

Here's how it works: Typically installed as either a standalone client software solution or as a network solution for up to 25 connected workstations, PDR solutions create a hidden protected partition on the PC. The software then provides the user with the ability to set and make incremental backups to this hidden partition at the interval of their choice (for instance, every 5 or 10 minutes). When needed, the user can recover missing data at any of these incremental backup points.

The PDR actually makes a complete snapshot of the hard drive, which can become the new master system image in case of hard drive failure, the need to migrate to new hardware or the need to reconfigure their system to defined parameters on a regular basis.

The software should be accessible from within the operating system as well as contain a pre-OS interface. Because the software loads before the OS, it is not dependent on the OS working properly. In the case of an operating system crash resulting in a "blue screen of death," PDR software can be accessed upon reboot, post OS crash, and users can select a backup point from the pre-OS interface to restore the system, thus fixing the OS problem.

Most PDR solutions should also have the ability to store backups on network drives, external USB drives and CD/DVD media. Finally, security features such as password protection should be included to control access and prevent accidental recovery to an earlier point in time when not actually needed.

Again, the real success of any backup solution is in the frequency of the backups that are made. As with CDP solutions, PDR backups happen automatically. Users can set it and forget it as the software runs silently in the background recording all sector-level changes that occur on the system. By keeping a log of all changes, the software can easily revert to a backup point prior to the point of data loss. Easy-to-find and quick recovery saves the user a significant amount of downtime.

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