What is instant recovery? A way to quickly restore lost files and test backup systems
The concept of instant recovery is relatively simple – the ability to run a virtual machine directly from a backup of that VM – but the possibilities offered by such a simple concept are virtually limitless, which explains why it’s considered one of the most important advances in backup and recovery for many years.
Before the advent of instant recovery all restores were basically the same, starting with how backups were stored – in some type of container or image. Prior to commercial backup-and-recovery software, backups were stored in formats such as tar, cpio, or dump.