As any user of cloud backup knows, one of the biggest advantages to backing up in the cloud is the fact that backups can be automatically scheduled, making for one less task that has to be monitored by a company’s IT department, while also avoiding any chance for human error to get in the way of the scheduled backup process. However, recent advances in cloud backup technology have brought about yet another level of consistent, dependable data backup practises, continuous cloud backup.

What is Continuous Cloud Backup?

With continuous cloud backup (also known as continuous data protection or real-time backup), your small to medium-sized or enterprise business can enjoy the peace of mind of knowing that anytime certain files are modified in any way that this change in information will be automatically sent off to the cloud backup provider’s servers, offering you true continuous protection from data loss. Indeed, even the tiniest change in a file will be instantly copied to the cloud backup servers at the time that the user makes it, and, through the use of a process called “file versioning”, previous versions of files will be available for retrieval from the cloud backup cache, even if these versions no longer exist on the company’s system! Critical to this process is the automatic generation of a time stamp to go along with each new version of a file that is being automatically saved, rendering the finding of the correct previous version of a file easily and quickly achieved.

Continues Backups and Bandwidth

Interestingly enough, despite the fact that the word “continuous” makes it sound as if continuous backup is indeed “more backing up” than scheduled backups, continuous backups actually take up much less bandwidth and system resources, with only the parts of files that have been changed being backed up, and not the whole file. These changes are often quite small, sometimes only amounting to a few bytes of data, so system resources are thus preserved at both ends. For this reason, continuous data protection is the ideal backup solution for any company that finds it difficult to find consistent times when their networks are dormant enough to perform all their backups at once, without detracting from system performance.  In the same way, companies that are generating large quantities of highly important data 24 x 7 also benefit greatly from this cutting edge data protection technology.

In Part II, we will further discuss the many advantages of continuous cloud backups.