SonicWall CDP (Continuous Data Protection)

Hello,

I will explain my point of view about this useful product to help you in your file server backups.

Tipical Situation:

Normaly you have a daily backup of your servers, and it starts at night.
Next day you need to check your backups - cartdriges - logs - etc... (In my case I don't like this) and a lot of times you have problems, some files are skiped, or you need to clean the backup unit, or errors and errors and errors...
About this tipical kind of backups, you know: I'm backing up file servers only at night and if some user needs to restore a file created in the same day, maybe, you don't backed up this.
For solve this we have the "shadow copy" inside our windows servers but in some case it works wrong.

I can continue writting a lot of issues but I think is enough to show this problems.

A solution to improve my service for users and make a "real time" backup for me was dream, and forgive the continuos checkings was an utopia.
Soniwall CDP offers you the possibility to backup 14 old versions of your files and it copy all at real time.
In my case, I have some servers outside my Lan and I have bandwith restrictions for cost reasons.
Anytime, I installed SonicWall CDP 1440 for test if is possible to do a remote backup of my remote servers trought Wan (1Mbit bandwith). After the installation of the agent on all servers I defined all I want to backup and SonicWall starts to get all the files in a queue.
We have about 25Gigas of files in one of our external sites and after 2 days the SonicWall works at real time without any queued file. After a week I wanted to restore some files and I could see about 14 old version per file available !

I think SonicWall CDP is a very good "complement" to improve your backup method to online backup. Don't forgot your daily backup because SonicWall CDP Backups your files and old versions but this don't backup the file security (permisons) in standard backup.
SonicWall CDP have more features like a "ghost" image of your servers, exchange backup, and others.

For more information: http://www.sonicwall.com/us/backup_and_recovery.html

Regards.