Snapshot vs Continuous Data Protection
This page was deprecated on 18 August 2025. Refer to the SANsymphony WebHelp for the latest and updated documentation.
A snapshot backup freezes a copy of the data at a given point in time. This enables the business to remain on-line and recover from outages by resuming business from a previous point in time. However, backups using a snapshot create additional load on a system. Each snapshot adds incremental performance load and increases the storage capacity consumption.
Consequently, determining the backup frequency is a balance between the cost of an outage and the system performance. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is a time value identifying the decision. It identifies the amount of data loss (financial loss) acceptable when recovering from an outage. The larger the value, the greater the potential financial cost.
A Continuous Data Protection (CDP) is an additional protection option that can recover data with an RPO of seconds and minutes, where all change data is tracked by the time of change. The system keeps a history of all the changed data by saving that data and associating a time with it. As a result, one can recover that data as it was seconds before a change is made. Based on the CDP, it is possible to create recovery points in the past.
The Veeam plug-in utilizes SANsymphony's CDP capability, which aids in ransomware protection. It uses the rollback points as recovery points. Veeam Explorer is capable to use the CDP rollbacks to recover from crashes and unexpected events.
Expose CDP Rollbacks
To expose CDP Rollbacks:
- Use the SANsymphony REST-API, Powershell, or Console to create a rollback point on a CDP-enabled vDisk. Rollbacks return as snapshots to the Veeam Explorer when it asks for the snapshots.
- To delete the rollback points from the VBR, click Delete Snapshot.
These rollbacks are treated as ordinary snapshots by the Veeam application (VBR), allowing you to perform every function that can be performed on ordinary snapshots. Example: Recovering virtual machines (VM), recovering guest data, etc.
References
The following topics provide detailed information on SANsymphony Snapshot and CDP: