Abstract: A system for data backup and recovery. A backup storage in a form of a file or a directory is created on a storage media. The backup storage is “hidden” from the file system, form user processes, form an operating system and from a data storage driver. The backup file is visible to only backup/restore application. The data is backed up into the “hidden” backup storage. The files system, the user processes, the operating system and the data storage driver do not know about the backup file and the areas of the storage media occupied by the backup file. When a write request for writing a data block to the space within the storage media occupied by the files of the “hidden” backup is received the write request is redirected to a free space on the storage media.

Abstract: Continuous data protection is performed as two parallel processes: creating an initial backup by copying a data as a file/directory from the storage device into the backup storage, and copying the data to be written to the data storage as a part of a file/directory into the incremental backup. Alternatively, it can be performed as one process: copying the data to be written to the data storage as a part of a file/directory on the storage. A write command to a file system driver is intercepted and redirected to the backup, and the data is written to the incremental backup. If the write command is also directed to a not yet backed up data (a file/directory), the identified data is copied from the storage device to intermediate storage. The write command is executed on the file/directory from the storage device, and the file/directory is copied from the intermediate storage.