A method, system, computer system, and computer-readable medium to trigger protection of a set of data based upon the type or class of the data in the set and/or an amount of data that has changed since some prior point in time. Types of protection that can be triggered include full backup, incremental backup, switching to a different type of continuous replication, intermittent replication, and virus detection. Using the type of the data as a basis for triggering protection enables the operational significance of different sets of data to be taken into account when allocating protection resources. Data sets may be pre-classified, or an automated determination of the type of a data set may be determined by variables measured at run-time. The amount of the changed data in a set that triggers protection may vary in accordance with the type of the set of data.