I have talked about few backup solutions for home users in my previous posts. To be specific i have talked about Mozy Home and Carbonite as the backup solution for home users who got a limited amount of data to backup or restore in case of some problem. These solution do provide good performance for home users and are more than enough.

Today i will be talking about one of the backup solutions for enterprises, small businesses etc. As many of you know, these enterprises and small business need proper backup/security for their business data and the critical process that it supports, keeps changing each day. Even the amount of the data they need to backup runs into terabytes of hard disk space. Along with all that the data need to be properly encrypted with the best encryption algorithm available to protect data more efficiently and reliably.

One of the concepts that’s widely used for backing up critical data of big businesses and enterprises is Point-in-time recovery. This concept is not a new or complicated one in broad terms. If you are a windows user, you may have used this concept many times. This concept is used in system restore feature of windows System restore feature whereby a set of data or a particular setting can be restored or recovered from a time in the past.

Those of you who have ever used the system restore feature know what i am talking about. For those who never used system restore feature, take a look at the above images and you will know what i am talking about.

As per one of the online backup company Storagepipe that provides this type of backup solution, Point in time recovery is defined as:

Point in time means that you not only have the ability to restore your data to the latest backup, but you can also choose an earlier date. This can be handy if you’re interested in a previous version of a file, especially after virus damage, or other data corruption scenarios. If a virus started destroying data two months ago, and wasn’t detected, the latest backup of a file will not help you. With point-in-time you can go back to the pre-infected date of that file and restore as easily as you would restore a normal file. In an emergency, point-in-time is your best friend.

This solution as in the case of Storagepipe operate with implementation of strict security protocols along with systems hardened, patched and only running necessary services resulting in enhanced security for the data stored.

The rest of the process is almost same as in case of normal backup solutions like Mozy and carbonite along with many factors depend on the bandwidth capacity, and storage requirements of the customer as i discussed in my previous posts about backup solutions.

So how the backup works if you got in problem, then point in time comes to your rescue. I will quote here directly from storagepipe:

In the event you have a virus, point-in-time restore capability is your best friend. If last night’s backups are infected they become useless. Unless you have the ability to restore to a specific point in time, your data management solution has failed.

I can write more about this, but it will make the post boring for you people to read. Just post a comment here if you got any doubts about anything i have written here. I would be happy to answer you.