With each passing day I find myself putting one or more pieces of information about myself on my computer. I am sure you too have this experience. It is frightening that all of this data can vanish into cyberspace because of an abnormal surge in electricity, a deliberate and malicious infection from a virus or worm, or an accidental erasure. What took five, ten or more years to build up will be gone in an instant. Imagine what it would feel like if you don’t have backups or you have backups that you can’t restore.
The older version of backups used a tape-based arrangement which made daily backups of local transactions. However, financial concerns processing millions of credit and debit card transactions, and other high volume processors, require more frequent backups, and as well more reliable security if a major crisis occurs.
This lead to the discovery of continuous backup systems which serve as a reliable solution for high volume processors. With continuous backup systems you automatically copy data to a backup file as you key in new transactions or make changes to a customer account, for example. This means there is no time difference between recording the transaction and backing up the file. Indeed, this is a reliable and sure method for backing up data.
Windows XP uses continuous backup with the system restore feature included in the program. Other technologies also include some form of continuous backup. However, they represent a mishmash of standards that do not provide compatibility across the different technologies.
This makes it difficult for users who use more than one technology. The key to this technology, though, is the you can restore the backup using any specific time as a base. For example, you can restore the backup for the last date before your system crashed.