with less complexity and cost. For example, snapshots ["near-CDP" clarification in the section below] can provide a reasonable near-CDP-level of protection for file shares, letting users directly access data on the file share at regular intervals—say, every half hour or 15 minutes. That's certainly a higher level of protection than tape-based or disk-based nightly backups and may be all you need." Because "near-CDP does this [copying] at pre-set time intervals", it is essentially incremental backup initiated—separately for each source machine—by timer instead of script. Continuous vs near continuous Since true CDP "backup write operations are executed at the level of the basic input/output system (BIOS) of the microcomputer in such a manner that normal use of the computer is unaffected", true CDP backup must in practice be run in conjunction with a virtual machine or equivalent—ruling it out for ordinary personal backup applications. It is therefore discussed in the "Enterprise client-server backup" article, rather than in the "Backup" article. Some solutions marketed as continuous data protection may only allow restores at fixed intervals such as 15 minutes or one hour or 24 hours, because they automatically take incremental backups at those intervals. Such "near-CDP"—short for near-continuous data protection—schemes are not universally recognized as true continuous data protection, as they do not provide the ability to restore to any point in time. When the interval is shorter than one hour, "near-CDP" solutions—for example Arq Backup—are typically based on periodic "snapshots"; "to avoid downtime, high-availability systems may instead perform the backup on ... a read-only copy of the data set frozen at a point in time—and allow applications to continue writing to their data". There is debate in the industry as to whether the granularity of backup must be "every write" to be CDP, or whether a "near-CDP" solution that captures the data every few minutes is good enough. The latter is sometimes called near continuous backup. The debate hinges on the use of the term continuous: whether only the backup process must be continuously automatically scheduled, which is often sufficient to achieve the benefits cited above, or whether the ability to restore from the backup also must be continuous. The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) uses the "every write" definition. There is a briefer sub-sub-section in the "Backup" article about this, now renamed to "Near-CDP" to avoid confusion. Differences from RAID, replication or mirroring Continuous data protection differs from RAID, replication,