Glossary of R1Soft Technical Terminology

CDP Agent
CDP Server
Bare-Metal Disaster Recovery
Control Server
Device
Disk
Disk Safe
Host Discovery
Host
Linux CDP Agent
BTP
Storage Pool
Volume

CDP Agent
The service or daemon that runs on a computer being backed-up by R1Soft.  Installing a Backup Agent is required to take backups of a computer or restore files.  The Backup Agent accepts backup and restore requests from Backup Servers.

The R1Soft bare-metal disaster recovery CDs and PXE boot media run a copy of the CDP Agent.

Righteous Backup is licensed based on the number of purchased Backup Agents and Backup Servers.

CDP Server
The computer running R1Soft CDP Server software.  A server may be stand-alone or a node that is part of a Data Center cluster.  In the stand-alone version the Backup Server provides a web interface for management, a task scheduler to process scheduled backup jobs, and makes requests to CDP Agents to initiate backup or restore jobs.

Bare-Metal Disaster Recovery
The ability of a backup and restore system to restore a computer system to a previous state directly to a new unformatted hard disk or disks. 

To qualify as bare-metal disaster recovery, a backup system must restore all of the following: disk formatting, partition tables, Master Boot Record, Operating System and user files.

Control Server
The central controller in a deployment of CDP Server for Data Centers.  There may only be one control server for each installation of CDP Server for Data Centers.  The control server houses the database of hosts and their backup jobs.  It also controls each node in the cluster and batches out backup jobs to available Backup Servers.

Device
A device is a partition on a Host eligible for Backups.  For example on a Linux host a device might look like “/dev/sda1”.

Disk
A Disk is a directory or path for storing backup data made available to a Backup Server.  For example a Disk’s path might look like “E:\backup-data” or a network path like \\nas-device\share.

Disk Safe
Data on the CDP Server is stored in Righteous Software’s patent-pending Disk Safe storage format. This on disk format enables CDP Server to archive point-in-time recover images for long periods of time using as little disk space as possible. Scheduled point-in-time volume snapshots are scheduled on the CDP server. The CDP server then periodically connects to the CDP Agent program and synchronizes changed disk sectors to the CDP Server. The CDP Server creates a new point-in-time image of the disk volume every time it connects to the agent for synchronization. The point-in-time images are called recovery points and are stored in a Disk Safe.

Host Discovery
The process of adding a new CDP Agent to a CDP Server.  During this process a CDP Agent’s RSA public key is stored on the server.  A Host’s physical partitions or Devices are also automatically discovered during this task and the partition table is imported into the CDP Server.

Host
A Host is a computer running a CDP Agent.  A Host is any computer that is being backed up by a CDP Server and could be a desktop PC or a “server”.

Linux CDP Agent
A CDP Agent (see CDP Agent) that runs on the Linux operating system.

BTP
Block Transfer Protocol. This is the IP-based high performance network protocol used for transferring backup and restore data. The BTP service runs on port 1167 and uses TCP. Because BTP uses TCP/IP it can transfer data between any two computers on the Internet. BTP is highly secure and uses RSA keys for authentication. All BTP protocol traffic is encrypted using RSA keys and a Blowfish cipher. Block data (payload) may or may not be encrypted depending on user options.

Storage Pool
A collection of Disks used for storing the backup data for one or more Volumes.  Storage Pools consist of one or more Disks where the data is actually stored.  You can increase the capacity of a Storage Pool by adding more Disks to it.

Volume
Backups for one or more servers are stored on a Volume.  Volumes can be given a quota to limit its capacity for storing backup data.  A Volume can be assigned to one or more users.  You can also limit the number of host’s a user is allowed to add to a volume.  A Volume’s data is stored on a Storage Pool and a Volume must be assigned to a single Storage Pool.