TimeSpring Frequently Asked Questions
- What is TimeData?
- What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?
- Why is real time continuous data protection important?
- How can TimeData help me when I delete or corrupt data?
- How does TimeData differ from replication?
- How can TimeData help me process more data and run reports faster?
- How can TimeData help me make backup more reliable and efficient?
- Can I deploy TimeData with my existing backup infrastructure?
- My IT department does nightly backups. Why do I need TimeData?
- My company already has high availability hardware. Why do I need TimeData?
- How is TimeData different than RAID?
- How does TimeData reduce the administrative burden for IT departments, enabling them to achieve a lights-out operation?
- How does TimeSpring compare to traditional backup, snapshot and mirroring?
- How do you protect against viruses or human errors?
- What happens if a hacker deletes files or damages our system?
- How does TimeData make IT staff more productive?
- How is TimeData installed and how does it work?
- What platforms does TimeData support?
- Can TimeData help me with Disaster Recovery/ Business Continuance?
- How many data servers can I protect to a single repository?
- Does TimeData provide a command line interface?
- Does TimeData protect Exchange?
TimeData is file-based Continuous Data Protection software. TimeData seamlessly integrates into the application and storage environment to automatically and efficiently capture all changes to the application data in real time. This continuous capture and full change index system ensures that all moments of time in the data lifecycle are available and retrievable, and not subject to protection gaps or replicated corruption. Applications can quickly and easily roll back time with TimeData to retrieve a desired moment for a dataset.
2. What is Continuous Data Protection (CDP)?
Continuous data protection (CDP) is a methodology that continuously captures or tracks data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery points from any point in the past. CDP systems may be block-, file- or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable recovery points. Traditional data protection methodologies such as backup and snapshots, by comparison, provide incomplete, single point in time protection.
3. Why is real time continuous data protection important?
Continuous data protection raises the standard for data protection to the highest level by ensuring that business critical data is completely protected in a continuous, automatic, and real-time manner. Continuous data protection guarantees that when a system fault occurs the data will be fully retrievable, whether the cause is a software error, corruption, user error, virus attack, or anything else. With continuous data protection, data is protected every second of every day as changes occur in real-time. It provides complete granularity allowing administrators to recover data to any moment.
For example, if a virus attack occurs at 4:00 p.m., a system can be recovered to 3:59:59 p.m., right before the virus affected the system. This is an incredible improvement over traditional data protection. TimeData continuous data protection is an always on, automatic, and self-managing process that does not require the intervention of system or database administrators. The result for administrators is tremendous peace of mind that data is fully protected and easily recoverable to any moment when errors or faults occur.
4. How can TimeData help me when I delete or corrupt data?
Deletion and corruption of data are all too common, whether caused by user error, application error or a security breach, such as a virus. TimeData mitigates the damage by enabling the application to simply and quickly retrieve data from the precise moment before the damage occurred. You can think of it as an “application do-over” - rapid fixing of corrupt and deleted data, with a full change record of transactions. Simply select the data to be retrieved, then choose a “good” moment before the loss or damage occurred and click. You can safely attach or retrieve it within minutes.
5. How does TimeData differ from replication?
Replicating data provides a redundant copy. The replicated data is a duplicate of the primary. If data is deleted or corrupted on the primary copy, it is also deleted or corrupted on the replicate. Hence, it is not useful for application do-overs or for recapturing a past moment.
TimeData captures all data moments, so that they can be easily retrieved. In addition to providing a real time replicate, TimeData offers the ability to go back in time to a more desirable moment before corruption or deletion occurred.
6. How can TimeData help me process more data and run reports faster?
Businesses can effectively leverage their data assets using TimeData. Secondary or non-production servers can easily access relevant moment views of data sets for such purposes as reporting, analytical processing, or testing. In the case of software updates, application testing or failure analysis, desired datasets are simply presented to a secondary server without impacting primary operations. Month end can be recreated for reporting without slowing or impacting production resources.
7. How can TimeData help me make backup more reliable and efficient?
TimeData integrates with existing backup systems to improve data protection, while simplifying operations. Businesses can continue to run full backups to tape and maintain their offsite vaulting procedures but eliminate the media costs, complexity and unreliability of incremental or differential backups. Backups may be performed on production databases directly, or backup interruption eliminated entirely by backing up from the TimeData Repository.
Unlike standard nightly backups, TimeData offers complete protection and retrieval by eliminating the protection “gaps” that occur between backups and supporting better Recovery Point Objectives.
8. Can I deploy TimeData with my existing backup infrastructure?
Yes. TimeData is fully compatible with current backup environments and requires no special configuration or customisation. However, many administrators view the combination of traditional tape backup and continuous data protection as a way to simplify backup operations, leverage tape for offsite storage and vaulting.
One example of a simplified configuration is to rely on continuous data protection for data retrieval, eliminate daily incremental backups altogether, and run full backups to tape for offsite storage. This reduces the operational interrupts and backup constraints imposed by frequent backup operations and provides a level of data redundancy and disaster preparedness with respect to data.
Another scenario is to eliminate the impact of backup on the production environment altogether. Instead of backing up data on production servers, you can back up desired data views from the TimeData repository directly to tape for archive or offsite storage purposes. In this scenario, there is no backup window constraint on production servers.
9. My IT department does nightly backups. Why do I need TimeData?
Although most companies perform regular nightly backups, the poor reliability of traditional tape backups still leaves an organisation's data at risk. Storage Networking World (2002) estimates that 60% of backups do no execute properly, and 27% of apparently successful backups cannot be restored.
Because backups typically occur only once a day (usually at night), data is not protected until the backup job has finished executing. If a corruption, software error, user error, hardware crash, or virus attack occurs throughout the day, IT administrators must return to the previous day's backup to recover the system. There is a Recovery Point Objective of 24 hours that translates to a high-risk gap in data protection, since recovery of data from a backup usually results in data loss. The data restoration process from backup can be lengthy and result in lost productivity. The time taken to recover data can be measures as a Recovery Time Objective. TimeData offers a superior RTO versus traditional backup – minutes rather than hours.
TimeData's continuous data protection provides IT administrators with peace of mind that their data is completely safe while eliminating the burden of managing daily backups.
10. My company already has high availability hardware. Why do I need TimeData?
To protect data, applications, and systems completely, high availability hardware should be combined with TimeData software. High availability only ensures that hardware such as disk drives, network equipment, and servers are configured in a redundant manner to allow computing services to continue without incurring downtime when hardware failures occur. While high availability is great for hardware, it is not applicable to software or data. To date, there are no technologies that provide software or data protection that match the uptime levels achieved by high availability systems.
TimeData provides the data retrieval capability that allows computing environments to fully recover from all types of faults (software errors, corruptions, user errors, and virus attacks), enabling software, applications, and data to be as highly available as hardware. Combining Continuous Data Protection and High Availability provides the highest level of protection and availability for computing environments.
11. How is TimeData different than RAID?
RAID provides fault tolerance for disk storage. With RAID technology, data on a hard drive can be recovered in the event of a failure. RAID does not provide protection for other hardware devices such as servers or network equipment. RAID also does not protect data against software errors, corruptions, user errors, or virus attacks.
TimeData is a complimentary technology to RAID that provides complete protection of data when faults other than a disk drive failure occur. Just like backup technologies are deployed along with RAID today, users will also deploy TimeData in environments already using RAID. In these environments, TimeData will provide a higher level of overall system and data protection, while RAID will continue to protect disk drives from physical failures.
12. How does TimeData reduce the administrative burden for IT departments, enabling them to achieve a lights-out operation?
TimeData accomplishes this in three ways: All-In-One Architecture — customers can deploy and manage one data protection solution; Simple and immediate recovery of data using an intuitive GUI interface; and drag-and-drop capabilities — data protection becomes an automated and transparent process.
TimeSpring enables IT administrators to deploy a single system for all of their data protection needs. This eliminates the need for separate point solutions such as backup, snapshot, and replication. All aspects of data protection, including data life cycle management and remote replication are managed through TimeSpring Protector's unified management console. With only one system to deploy and manage, complexity is drastically reduced and the life of an IT Administrator is greatly simplified.
Unlike existing backup solutions, with TimeData, IT Administrators do not have to search though mountains of tapes to restore a single file. Because TimeData is disk based and information is always available online for retrieval, files can be restored with a few clicks of the mouse directly from the GUI interface. This eliminates the need for mounting tapes, searching through catalogs, and dealing with off-site hosting vendors to bring tapes back onsite.
Since TimeData automates data protection, IT Administrators do not have to spend any time scheduling backups, changing or managing tapes, or checking logs to see which backups have failed. With TimeData continuously running in the background, protecting data becomes an automatic, "lights out" operation. Data protection happens automatically and transparently, requiring no manual intervention. The only time an IT Administrator interacts with the software is when initiating a recovery. This greatly frees up administrators to work on other more pressing IT tasks and provides tremendous peace of mind.
13. How does TimeData compare to traditional backup, snapshot and mirroring?
| Features | Backup | Snapshot | Replication | TimeSpring |
| Continuous Data Protection |  |
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| Real-Time Automated Protection | |
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| Instant Retrieval of Data for Any Moment in Time | |
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| File Protection | |
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| Integrated Administration | |
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| Logical Protection (user errors, hackers,viruses,...) | |
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| Physical Protection (fire, flood, ...) | |
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| Reliability | |
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| Data Integrity | |
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| Data Currency | |
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| Data Reduction | |
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| Application Aware Protection | |
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| Cost | $$ |
$$$ |
$$$$$ |
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14. How do you protect against viruses or human errors?
TimeData tracks any corruption or damage that is caused by a virus or human error. While TimeData will not prevent errors such as a virus attack it is the most effective tool in reversing the effects. This is accomplished by using the software to recover to the exact moment before the damage occurred. All errors are correctable and all data can be recovered while maintaining complete integrity.
15. What happens if a hacker deletes files or damages our system?
TimeData tracks all changes on a system including files that are deleted, allowing a system or files to be recovered to any moment. This means that IT Administrators can completely reverse any damage, recover deleted files, and restore them to their desired state minutes, hours, days, weeks or months after the occurrence of the damage.
16. How does TimeData make IT staff more productive?
Since TimeData is completely automated, this allows the IT staff to invest more time on strategic initiatives instead of managing complex data protection operations. The simplicity of the software and its robust, intuitive interface, staff do not require expensive, time-consuming specialist training to operate TimeData.
17. How is TimeData installed and how does it work?
There are three main steps to the installation process:
1. The TimeData Repository software is installed on a dedicated Windows server
2. Lightweight TimeData Agents are installed on the Windows servers
3. Data management and retention policies are configured
When the software is initialised for the first time, the agents send data from the servers on which they are installed to the repository, creating an initial replica of the data on the data servers. Thereafter, only the ongoing data changes are captured in real time and transmitted to the repository.
18. What platforms does TimeData support?
TimeData supports Windows 2000 Server with SP4, Windows 2000 Advanced Server with SP4, Windows 2003, Windows 2003 Advanced Server, SQLServer 2000, Exchange 2000, and Exchange 2003, as well as NTFS files. If you have a specific requirement, please contact us, as we continue to expand our support coverage.
19. Can TimeData help me with Disaster Recovery/ Business Continuance?
TimeData can protect data continuously to a secondary repository at a remote site. In the event of a disaster or outage at the primary site, operations can be resumed at the secondary site. TimeData makes up-to-date and historical data simply and quickly retrievable. Here is the workflow:
1. Set up recovery Data Server (OS, applications, operating environment) (The recovery data server may already be set up or may need to be acquired and set up, depending on the policy and investment made by the user).
2. Set up network link from recovery Data Server to Repository.
3. Use TMC to retrieve data from Repository to recovery Data Server.
4. May install and configure TimeData to protect recovery Data Server.
A TimeData remote repository will support up to 2 remote data servers. TimeSpring requires that any data server being protected remotely be protected locally also. This ensures protection even in the event of network outage, so that data is not compromised or exposed to loss. TimeData works over standard WAN, either dedicated or shared. Please consult with your TimeSpring representative to plan and size the DR environment.
20. How many data servers can I protect to a single repository?
TimeSpring recommends a data server to repository ratio of no more than 8:1.
21. Does TimeData provide a command line interface?
TimeData offers a command line utility to manage views, which can be very helpful in scripting operations such as those associated with backing up archive data to tape or for reporting.
22. Does TimeData protect Exchange?
Yes, TimeData supports Exchange 2000 and 2003. TimeData offers flexible, granular recovery of an individual mailbox, message, folder, attachment or calendar item. Message Subject, Body and attachment file names can be searched by keyword, sender, recipient, subject, or date. Recovery of any element can be to the production Exchange Server or a new or existing .PST file.