Patent ID: 7546428

Claim:
A system for backup, restoration and recovery of data used with a client application server, the system comprising: a backup server including backup media management software for managing backup media onto which data used with the client application server is backed up, the backup server storing a snapshot of data used, according to a known time to discover a defect, by the client application server, the snapshot comprising a re-startable point in time recovery object; a continuous backup appliance including a contiguous data journal log in communication with the backup server and on which time-ordered writes are archived according to a known time to discover a defect, wherein virtual snapshots of data used with the client application server are created by designating selected ones of the time-ordered writes as incremental recovery points; a disk array storage system in communication with the backup server and continuous backup appliance on which data is stored that is used with the client application server; and a storage management server in communication with the disk array storage system and the continuous backup appliance to enable writes to the disk storage array and a concurrent copy of each write to the continuous backup appliance's data journal log so that recovery or restoration of backed up data to an incremental recovery point may be accomplished by sequentially applying writes from the journal up to and including the time-ordered write associated with the incremental recovery point to the snapshot of data.