Daily Backups are inadequate for critical business systems. Even hourly, or even backups as often as every 15 minutes can be insufficient (not to mention place an unacceptable load on the production server).
Imagine that you have a highly transactional database – where each transaction = money = reputation.
Now imagine that critical server suffers data corruption – accidental data loss or sabotage. Crypto lock, Ransomware or Disaster?
What do you do? Recover your last backup? What about the lost transactions?
The answer is “Data Rewind”… Recover your data from the instant prior to the corruption? Think of it as a Point in Time Backup taken for every transaction.
This simple demo shows how Arcserve RHA can be used to Rewind & recover a SQL Database to the instant immediately prior to data loss.
Can your Data Protection product do that?
What Is Arcserve RHA?
Arcserve RHA (Replication and High Availability) is a continuous data replication engine designed for environments where downtime and data loss are simply not acceptable. Unlike traditional backup products that capture snapshots at scheduled intervals, RHA works at the byte level, replicating every write operation from a source server to a replica in real time.
Version 18 introduced several improvements, including full Linux system protection (covered in a separate article), enhanced cloud target support, and the Data Rewind feature demonstrated here. RHA supports replication to physical servers, virtual machines on VMware or Hyper-V, and cloud instances on AWS or Azure.
How Data Rewind Works
Data Rewind maintains a journal of every change applied to the replica. When corruption or unwanted changes are detected on the source — whether from a failed application update, accidental deletion, or ransomware encryption — administrators can roll the replica back to any point in time within the journal window.
For SQL Server specifically, this means:
- Transaction-level granularity — Every committed transaction is captured, so you can recover to the exact moment before corruption occurred, not just the last hourly or daily snapshot.
- No impact on production — Because RHA replicates asynchronously at the byte level, the source SQL Server experiences negligible overhead. There are no VSS snapshots freezing I/O, no agent-based log shipping contention.
- Journal-based rollback — The rewind operation reads the journal in reverse, undoing changes until the target timestamp is reached. This is far quicker than restoring a full backup and then replaying transaction logs.
- Automated integrity checks — RHA validates that the SQL Server instance on the replica is consistent before and after the rewind operation.
Practical Scenarios for SQL Server Data Rewind
Consider an Australian accounting firm processing payroll for hundreds of client organisations. Their SQL Server database handles thousands of transactions daily during pay runs. If a junior DBA accidentally runs an UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause at 2:47 PM, traditional backups would lose everything since the last scheduled backup — potentially hours of payroll calculations.
With Arcserve RHA Data Rewind, the recovery process is straightforward:
- Open the Arcserve RHA management console
- Select the SQL Server scenario
- Choose “Data Rewind” and specify the timestamp — say, 2:46 PM
- RHA rolls the replica database back to that exact point
- Promote the replica or export the recovered data back to production
The entire process typically completes in minutes, regardless of database size, because it only needs to reverse the changes recorded in the journal rather than restore terabytes of backup data.
Other scenarios where Data Rewind proves its value:
- Ransomware encryption — Rewind to the moment before the encryption began, then failover to the clean replica
- Failed application upgrades — A software update corrupts the database schema; rewind removes the damage without a full restore
- Compliance audits — Retrieve the exact state of a database at a specific date and time for regulatory reporting
Who Should Consider Arcserve RHA?
RHA is best suited for organisations running mission-critical Windows or Linux workloads where even short periods of data loss carry real financial or regulatory consequences. Common deployments include:
- Financial services — Trading platforms, payment processors, and accounting systems
- Healthcare — Patient records systems where data gaps could affect care
- Government — Departments running transactional databases for citizen services
- Retail and e-commerce — Order management and inventory systems during peak trading
For Australian and New Zealand businesses, Arcserve RHA can replicate between on-premises data centres, to AWS Sydney or Azure Australia East, or to co-location facilities — keeping data within the region to satisfy sovereignty requirements.
Availability Through Cloud Ready Solutions
Arcserve RHA is available through Cloud Ready Solutions for partners across Australia and the Pacific Islands. CRS provides pre-sales technical guidance, licensing assistance, and access to demo environments so partners can evaluate RHA Data Rewind against their customers’ specific database workloads before committing.