Dell DL1000 Appliance User's Guide

A recovery point is a collection of snapshots taken of individual disk volumes and stored in the repository. Snapshots capture and store the state of a disk volume at a given point in time while the applications that generate the data are still in use. In AppAssure, you can force a snapshot, temporarily pause snapshots, and view lists of current recovery points in the repository as well as delete them if needed. Recovery points are used to restore protected machines or to mount to a local file system.

The snapshots that AppAssure captures are captured at the block level and are application aware. This means that all open transactions and rolling transaction logs are completed and caches are flushed to disk before creating the snapshot.

AppAssure uses a low-level volume filter driver, which attaches to the mounted volumes and then tracks all block-level changes for the next impending snapshot. Microsoft Volume Shadow Services (VSS) is used to facilitate application crash consistent snapshots.