A data management system or "DMS" provides a wide range of data services to data sources associated with a set of application host servers. The data management system typically comprises one or more regions, with each region having one or more clusters. A given cluster has one or more nodes that share storage. To facilitate the data service, a host driver embedded in an application server connects an application and its data to a cluster. The host driver provides a method and apparatus for capturing real-time data modifications and application state notifications and, in response, generating data transactions in the form of an event journal that is provided to the data management system. The driver functions to translate traditional file/database/block I/O into a continuous, application-aware, output data stream. Using the streams generated in this manner, the DMS offers a wide range of data services that include, by way of example only: data protection (and recovery), and disaster recovery (data distribution and data replication).