What are the differences between Idera Online Backup and Snapshot Backup?

Snapshot backups are no longer available with your SimplerCoud servelet. They refer to creating a snapshot of the disks (volumes) on your servelet, namely the root-disk and data-disk. Regardless of the usage, snapshot backup will perform a backup of the whole disk. That’s why snapshot backup can take quite a long time, depends on the size of the disk. For example, if you have a 80 GB of disk space, snapshot backup will back up the whole 80 GB volume, even though you only have 20 GB of data on the volume, for example. You cannot choose which files you want to backup. When recovery needs to be perform, we need to attach the whole volume to the servelet, for customer to access the volume and copy the backup files they want to restore. Its inefficiency also have known to make the system to be unstable in certain conditions.

Idera Online Backup is different. It uses Continuous Data Protection (CDP) technology, to back up only the data that you need to back up. The interface provides you an option to choose which files, directories, drives you want to backup. It also performs incremental backups, which is done at the block level instead of file level, greatly improves the backup speed and reduces the I/O. Recovery can also be done by customers through the interface, by selecting which files they want to recover. On top of that, Idera also uses agents to be installed on the servelets for certain backup operations, such as database backup.