Data security has always been an important topic, and its significance somehow got even bigger over the last few decades, with ransomware and other types of cyberattacks attempting to steal or corrupt important information on a regular basis. This logic applies to both personal and corporate information, and the line between the two can be somewhat blurry in many cases.
Cybersecurity has many different approaches and methods to it, with newer solutions and improvements to existing tools being developed on a regular basis. There are also some security measures that are considered fundamental for practically every system out there.

Backups as a process can be considered one such measure, seeing as they have become practically mandatory for most companies. The simplicity of a basic backup operation and the effectiveness of one such measure against several different types of disasters is what made backups so popular, to begin with.
At the same time, cybersecurity threats keep evolving at an alarming pace, and most security measures have to keep up to avoid becoming outclassed and vulnerable. Backup processes are no exception, evolving and improving multiple times over the years, adding new features and improving existing ones.
Backup methods are some of the most fundamental elements of any backup strategy, and they are no exception to the aforementioned rule. The original idea of a backup only included a single method called “Full,” which creates a complete copy of every file in a target location.
This backup has many disadvantages, including a high demand for backup storage, a long backup process, and so on. At the same time, it can be restored with relative ease, and there are practically no prerequisites for the restoration process as a whole. Nevertheless, it is far from perfect, which is why there are multiple other backup methods that are used to achieve the best possible results for many different use cases.
For example, the “Differential” backup method uses a slightly different approach as a whole. It can only be used in tandem with a Full backup to act as the baseline since Differential backups create a copy of every single file that has been changed since the last Full backup. This kind of approach helps a lot with both the storage space requirements and the overall backup speed. Still, it does come at a price of making data restoration far more complex and time-consuming than before (since now there is a necessity to have both the last Full and the last Differential backup in order to restore the entire copy).
There is also at least one more backup method called “Incremental”, which is somehow even more difficult in terms of restoration. The main difference between Incremental and Differential is the fact that Incremental backups are created by copying every single file that was changed since the last backup (any backup). This often creates the so-called chain of small Incremental backups, all of which are necessary in order to restore the entire system image if necessary.
These three backup methods are often considered the baseline for how many backup systems operate, but there are also plenty of other options that capitalize on one or several of these mechanics. For example, there is a relatively popular tactic called Continuous Data Protection backup, which is practically an evolution of the aforementioned Incremental backup model.
CDP is a real-time data protection tactic. It uses the backup system framework to continuously capture any and all changes made since the last Full backup. Not only can CDP offer an extremely low potential level of data loss (since the data is backed up constantly), but it is also an incredibly helpful versioning solution due to the necessity of storing multiple copies of the same information as it is changed.
The parallels between CDP and Incremental backups are very obvious. Both of these methods use traditional backup methods as the basis for their approach (as well as the reliance on the “Full” backup as the starting point). They also both use the same logic of making the time between backups as low as possible to minimize potential data loss.
Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to similarities between the two. However, these examples alone should be enough proof to understand how similar Incremental backups are to CDP in its basic form. The separating line between the two gets even blurrier when you consider that the “true” CDP is extremely difficult to achieve, and many different companies work with “near-CDP” instead – with weaker security benefits but also a much lower entry barrier.
Continuous Data Protection can be very useful for most companies. However, it can also be very difficult to implement, especially in bigger and more complex commercial environments. That’s not to say that personal data would not be able to benefit from the integration of CDP, either – especially considering how widespread remote work is all over the world.
Getting back to the topic of near-continuous data protection, there is a surprisingly large selection of solutions that already offer this capability. One of the most well-known examples is the Time Machine tool on Apple desktop and laptop devices. It was first introduced in Mac OS X 10.5 and continuously improved over the years, providing a convenient backup mechanism for user data that can be restored at practically any time.
The basic capability of a Time Machine is a series of incremental backups with extensive versioning capabilities that also support application data export for some apps (iWork or Mail) without disrupting the application itself. It creates backups on an hourly basis throughout the last 24 hours, slowing down the backup pace to one backup a day for the past month and setting the backup time frame for once a week until the current storage volume runs out of free storage space (which is when the last weekly backup is deleted to open more storage and the cycle continues).
Of course, Time Machine is not a perfect solution for a more work-oriented environment since its smallest possible period between backups is one hour (and it cannot be tasked with backing up every single modified file immediately). In a more commercial environment, using a third-party backup solution with true CDP is a preferable option. However, the existing capabilities of Apple’s proprietary solution are more than enough to cover most of its casual users’ capabilities, which seems to be good enough for Apple itself.