IBM entered the red-hot scramble for continuous data protection with software that lets corporate employees save their data from corruption and outages milliseconds after it is created.

IBM's Tivoli Continuous Data Protection for Files backs up Word documents, presentations and spreadsheets on company servers, tape drives, or memory cards in real-time.

Mike Nelson, IBM's director of Information on Demand, said the idea is to save data created by people who connect to corporate networks from remote home offices through desktops, or even Starbucks coffee shops using laptops.

Nelson said IBM's CDP software saves data as it is created and exchanged, alleviating the burden of a scheduled backup session. Within milliseconds, the software creates a copy on the local machine and then sends another copy to a remote server.

The application solves some of the most common complaints mobile workers have: Protecting and restoring files that are corrupted or accidentally deleted up to the minute after an error or outage occurred.

IBM's solution isn't the first to market. In fact, CDP is an increasingly popular trend among makers of storage software.

Microsoft's forthcoming System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), will recover data from snapshots to alleviate the burdens of manual data recovery.