Continuous data protection (CDP), also called continuous backup or real-time backup, refers to backup of computer data by automatically saving a copy of every change made to that data, essentially capturing every version of the data that the user saves. In its true form it allows the user or administrator to restore data to any point in time. The technique was patented by British entrepreneur Pete Malcolm in 1989 as "a backup system in which a copy [editor's emphasis] of every change made to a storage medium is recorded as the change occurs [editor's emphasis]." In an ideal case of continuous data protection, the recovery point objective—"the maximum targeted period in which data (transactions) might be lost from an IT service due to a major incident"—is zero, even though the recovery time objective—"the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity"—is not zero. An example of a period in which data transactions might be lost is a major discount chain having card readers at its checkout counters shut down at multiple locations for close to two hours in the month of June 2019. CDP runs as a service that captures changes to data to a separate storage location. There are multiple methods for capturing continuous live data changes involving different technologies that serve different needs. True CDP-based solutions can provide fine granularities of restorable objects ranging from crash-consistent images to logical objects such as files, mail boxes, messages, and database files and logs. This isn't necessarily true of near-CDP solutions. Differences from traditional backup True continuous data protection is different from traditional backup in that it is not necessary to specify the point in time to recover from until ready to restore. Traditional backups only restore data from the time the backup was made. True continuous data protection, in contrast to "snapshots", has no backup schedules. When data is written to disk, it is also asynchronously written to a second location, either another computer over the network or an appliance. This introduces some overhead to disk-write operations but eliminates the need for scheduled backups. Allowing restoring data to any point in time, "CDP is the gold standard—the most comprehensive and advanced data protection. But 'near CDP' technologies can deliver enough protection for many companies