Back-up and restoration of data between volatile and flash memory

A system for controlling back-up of data to flash memory, wherein the system includes a back-up engine having a processor for backing-up data to flash memory formed of multiple flash devices, wherein the back-up engine provides commands to multiple flash device controllers having dedicated flash interfaces to the multiple flash devices, the back-up engine comprising:

• a data structure component for organizing back-up data into stripes, wherein a stripe is a set of pages across all available flash memory devices, dies and planes which have the same block and page address;
• a volatile storage for storing metadata regarding the back-up process including maintaining metadata indicating locations of known bad planes and grown bad planes, wherein the volatile storage has a temporary power supply;
• a back-up writing component using the metadata when writing back-up data to determine which planes to send cache program commands to;
• a caching component for sending cache program commands to three or more stripes of data simultaneously including providing an indication in a stripe that the stripe is handling a cache program command;
• and
• a re-writing component, wherein if a grown bad block is encountered whilst saving a stripe of data, the stripe of data is re-written to the next available page address avoiding the grown bad block.