All technologies have their limitations. Data snapshots do too. For example, say you have data snapshots of an SAP database, which do not include the software and the patches installed over the last few months. Planning to rebuild your environment piece by piece is heading for trouble, says Ray Stride, MD of Global Continuity South Africa.

“You have to snapshot the whole environment at the same point in time. You have to be able to roll backwards and forwards during restore, to build the point representing what your business looked like, say last Wednesday, or seven months ago, just before you had a disastrous data corruption,” says Stride.