Data and time are your most important assets. Once you lose access to data, you lose time. And time is money in business. Fact is that it takes about 30 hours to rebuild 20MB of data, and it costs about £50 000.

The Shocking Truth
You need to ask yourself the following questions: Do you back up data daily? Have you specifically delegated someone to ensure a daily backup of data? Is he or she adequately qualified to do so? Are the backup tapes stored securely off-site, and will these tapes prove reliable if and when you need to restore the data?

Research throws up some shocking statistics: 99% of businesses do not back up daily, 60% of backups are only partial, 50% of restores are unsuccessful.

The aftermath can be fatal to business.

In general, by day 6 after a major data loss, companies suffer a 25% loss in daily revenue. By the 25th day, it is 40%. 43% of businesses that undergo a critical data loss disaster and that don't have a data recovery plan, never re-open. To a U.K. SME, a virus attack costs an average of £843, and about 7.2 hours in downtime. And the Data Protection Act of 1998 states: "You must safeguard your own or anyone else's data, by appropriate precautions against loss, corruption, or authorised disclosure."

The Only Solution - Daily Data Backup
You never know what could strike your computer. It could be a virus, electrical surge, mechanical failure, man-made error, or even flood or fire. Therefore, at least in small and medium-sized businesses, backups should run daily. So, if there is data loss, it would only be the information recorded since the last backup that is lost. In such cases, most SMEs would not find it recovery difficult. However, when it comes to financial service organisations, even the loss of one day's data could prove disabling. Such organisations with demanding data loads must make a greater effort to prevent data loss.

Continuous Data Protection (CDP)
This is a service that enables a continuous backup of computer data by automatically saving every change made to the data. The changes in the data are sent to a separate storage location, off-site. This means backups are up to date to the last second of changes made. And it's incredibly fast. In a matter of minutes, a whole server can be recovered from a recent backup.

• A fresh backup is always maintained because backups are done four times a day.
• You are provided with 56 backup archives of your data since backups are kept for 2 weeks.
• For the ultimate reliability, backups are done at disk sector level, rather than the usual file level.
• In just a matter of minutes, individual files, whole websites, or servers can be restored.
• At any time, users can access their data backups, and browse and restore files.
• While in storage and during network transmission, data is continuously encrypted.

What Makes CDP Different from the Traditional Backup
While in the traditional backup system, you need to specify the point of time to which you would like to recover your data, this step is not required with Continuous Data Protection. In the case of the traditional backup, you can only restore data to the point at which the backup was done. But there are no backup schedules in the case of CDP. Data is written simultaneously to disk and to a second location (usually another computer over the network).

Another advantage of CDP, when compared to traditional backup, is that, in some instances, it will need less space on backup media. Unlike traditional backups that save file-level differences, most CDP solutions save byte or block-level differences. So, if one byte of a 100 GB file is changed, only this byte or block is backed up, not the entire file. It seems, at least for now, that Continuous Data Protection is the ideal method of daily backup.