What is Snapshot Consolidation?

RecoverPoint captures every write, enabling you to recover data from any point in time. Keeping days to months of every point in time, however, requires very large journals. Over time, re-writes to a single disk location consume a large amount of journal space. Additionally, the need to recover back to an exact point in time decreases as the data ages. The granularity of snapshots becomes less important over time.

Snapshot consolidation enables longer-term point-in-time recovery using the same storage consumption. Snapshot consolidation discards re-writes to the same disk location to save on journal space, which allows a longer history to be retained in the journal. Using snapshot consolidation, you decide how long to retain every write captured, and at what point to consolidate these writes to a daily, weekly, or monthly snapshot.

Snapshot consolidation allows you to retain the crucial per write or per second data of write transactions for a specified period of time (for example, the last 12 hours, days, weeks or months of transactions) and only then to start gradually increasing the granularity of older snapshots at preset intervals (for example, to create daily, then weekly, and then monthly snapshots).

A complete explanation of Snashot Consolidation can be found in the RecoverPoint Administration Guide.