How Does Data Protection Work?

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2007

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.

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 on the protected server. The following illustration shows the recovery process.

Data Protection in Action

Consider the following example of how you might use DPM to protect data:

• A file server in your network contains two volumes, E and F.

• Volume E hosts Share Z that contains inventory and purchase order information that changes 24/7.

• Volume F contains building maps and wiring diagrams. These files do not change often, but they are important for keeping company facilities maintained and secure.

You can use DPM to protect the data on both volumes, selecting synchronization and recovery point schedules that meet your data protection requirements.

To protect the share on Volume E

1. Create a protection group, InvOrders, and add Share Z to this protection group as a member. For more information, see How to Create a Protection Group.

2. Select the synchronization frequency, and schedule 8 recovery points to be created throughout the day.

DPM creates a replica of Share Z and creates 8 recovery points each day until it reaches the maximum of 64 recovery points. DPM does not allow you to set a protection policy that creates more than the maximum allowable number of recovery points.

With this protection configuration, the amount of file data you can lose depends on when snapshots were taken.For application data, the maximum amount of data you can lose is 15 minutes, depending on your protection configuration.

See Also

Concepts

What Is a Protection Group?
What Is a Recovery Point?
What Is a Replica?
What Is Synchronization?