It is known that check pointing and rollback recovery are widely used techniques that allow a distributed computing to progress in spite of a failure. There are two fundamental approaches for check pointing and recovery. One is asynchronous approach, process take their checkpoints independently. So, taking checkpoints is very simple but due to absence of a recent consistent global checkpoint which may cause a rollback of computation. Synchronous check pointing approach assumes that a single process other than the application process invokes the check pointing algorithm periodically to determine a consistent global checkpoint. Various flavors of these two techniques, their mechanisms, advantages and drawbacks have been discussed in detail. Besides an exhaustive study of the implementation issues are also included. Lastly, some open issues have been addressed and certain solutions have been proposed by the author.