Near-Continuous Data Protection (CDP) of SQL Server

Near continous data protection of SQL server

With version 4.5, ZCB now supports incremental (log-based) backups of SQL Server. This helps a great deal since log backups contain a list of all the individual changes to the database, and hence, provide an ability to restore the database to any historic timestamp, regardless of the actual backup time.

Why do we call this near-CDP and not CDP? Note that the log backups are not fired automatically upon each change event and are still “schedule based.” While this minimizes the backup overhead on your CPU/memory/bandwidth resources, it also means that you can only restore to a timestamp before a log backup has successfully taken place. That said, note that you can always choose a higher frequency for log backups (for example, “every 15 minutes”) to keep this as close to a true CDP system as you want.

While we’re discussing SQL Server backups, there is some more good news:  ZCB now performs Virtual Device Interface (VDI) based differential backups that can be significantly more compact and efficient than our earlier VSS based differential backups!

To see these improvements in action, login to your Zmanda account and download the latest 4.5 version from the Download tab!


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