Are there any alternatives to server-free backup that address the same problems?
If you asked this question five years ago, I would say no. It was the only way to do large server backups. However, the advent of continuous data protection (CDP) and near-CDP has created real alternatives to server-free backup. And, I think the large ISVs are agreeing with that. Many, if not most, of them have either acquired CDP technology or they are writing it themselves. With a large server, I don’t have enough time in the day or enough CPU cycles to back up this server in a reasonable amount of time. So, how are we going to do that? You have to take a step back. Really, what is a backup? Its just an alternate copy of your data for restores. CDP and near-CDP solve the problem in a different way. They don’t do the full backup or the nightly backup in the traditional sense. So CDP and near-CDP essentially remove the problems associated with large server backup. Because you are backing up the data as its changing, CDP and near-CDP work really well when you are backing up a large data
