What Does Continuous Data Protection Mean?
Continuous data protection (CDP) is a storage technology used to capture real-time data changes and facilitate data restore points and recovery. CDP saves modified data to separate storage locations. It is designed for remote backup operations optimized by built-in wide area networks (WAN) that support automatic connection failure and recovery. CDP logs all data modifications for access as required.
CDP is also known as continuous backup, storage convergence and real-time backup.
Techopedia Explains Continuous Data Protection
Multiple and varied CDP techniques are available and depend on the requirements of an organization. For example, CDP restore solutions range from crash-consistent images to logical objects, including messages, database files, mailboxes and logs.
CDP benefits include:
- Transaction record preservation, where corrupt files are replaced with earlier and clean versions
- Efficient data recovery
- Easy installation and programming, which does not affect stored data
CDP characteristics include the following:
- Frequent data changes, due to continuous rewriting of data
- Continuous runtime
- Significant organization-wide impact during system downtime
