Data Protection Manager (DPM) helps you manage the process of protecting and recovering data on the application servers, file servers, and workstations in your network. This topic describes the high-level steps you need to perform to successfully protect and recover data in the DPM environment.

Protecting Data

The DPM protection process involves creating and maintaining a full replica of the protected data and regularly creating recovery points of the synchronized replica. The replica serves as a full backup of the protected data. The recovery points allow you to recover previous versions of the protected data. The following illustration shows the protection process.



Retention range is always capped at 64 days whether DPM is protecting a file server, a workstation, or an application server. The maximum number of recovery points for each data source type are provided in the following table.

Type of Data Source Maximum Number of Disk-Based Recovery Points

Files

64 spread over a maximum of 448 days.

Exchange Server

Maximum of 96 per day. Express full backups spread over a maximum of 448 days.

SQL Server

Maximum of 96 per day. 512 Express full backups spread over a maximum of 448 days.

Windows SharePoint Services

512 spread over a maximum of 448 days.

Virtual Server

512 spread over a maximum of 448 days.

Hyper-V

512 spread over a maximum of 448 days.

Recovering Data

The DPM recovery process involves choosing a previous version of the data source from the stored recovery points on the DPM server, and then restoring a copy of the selected data to its point of origin or to an alternate location.

See Also