“Bought for backup. Judged by recovery.”

The best the backup industry can offer today is temporary access to yesterday’s data — usually through features like Instant Recovery of VMs.

ExaGrid improves this experience with their active tier, and they make genuinely great products. But let’s be honest about what Instant Recovery really is:

gives you:

• a running VM
• reconstructed from the last backup
• streamed from backup storage
• even if production storage is down

But it cannot give you:

• any data created after the last backup
• any data that lived only on primary storage
• any writes that happened between backup cycles
• any real‑time continuity of the production dataset

Therefore:

It’s not full recovery.

It’s not continuity.

It’s not business‑as‑usual.

It’s a temporary workaround with clever marketing.

So is it truly “Recovery”?

Or is it just Access Recovery, a stopgap that keeps the lights on while you wait for real storage to come back?

And that leads me to the line I’d use instead:

Bought for backup.

Judged by recovery.

Failed by architecture.

This isn’t a knock on ExaGrid. It’s a critique of an entire industry that has spent decades focused on incrementalism instead of innovation.

Everyone knows that Business Continuity is the holy grail. Yet here we are, still booting VMs from yesterday’s data and calling it “recovery.”

To be fair, it takes a long time to turn the Titanic.