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When talking about snapshots, I usually focus on the application or the data replication method of addressing the shortcomings of traditional backup in data protection and disaster recovery planning. Depending on who you ask, however, snapshots are either a boon or a bane. We cheer snaps when they simplify backup, replacing the time-consuming process of replicating data on a file-by-file or row-by-row basis to a target volume. Creating snapshots has certainly become faster and more flexible, with the latest evolution of the technology -- Symbolic IO's BLINK, for example -- snapshotting at the speed of a dynamic RAM write. Snapshots and snapshot management are also the bane of many operators' existence. They can get out of control, piling up on storage targets until they consume more space than RAID 1 ever did. Simply put, snapshots are so easy to create -- at the application, file system and bare-metal levels -- that users make a lot of them and forget to delete older ones. Solving the backlog issue was Catalogic Software's ...