Moving Between Co-Located and Non-Co-Located Protection Groups

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Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

Reprotecting Non–Co-Located Data to a Co-Located Protection Group

DPM first tries to add the inactive data source to an existing replica volume that has the required space for reprotecting the inactive data source. If DPM does not find space on an existing replica volume, it creates a new volume and then copies data from the inactive replica to the selected replica volume in the destination protection group.

After copying the data to the destination protection group, the member data source at the destination protection group is marked as Inconsistent and a consistency check is recommended.

The recovery points associated with the old replica will be deleted according to the retention range of the new protection group. After the last recovery point has been pruned, the old replica volume will be deleted.

Reprotecting Co-Located Data to a Non–Co-Located Protection Group

A new volume will be created and the data source will be added to it. If the volume has other data sources on it, all of which are inactive, only then the volume will be reused for one of the data sources. The old recovery points will be pruned as per the data source with the longest retention period.

The following examples take you through various scenarios to explain this behavior.

Scenario 1: Assume data source DS1 was protected on a co-located protection group PG1 that had a retention range of 3 days. If you were to remove DS1 from PG1 and re-protect it as a part of another protection group PG2 that has a retention range of 5 days, at the time of pruning the recovery points of PG1, the retention range of PG2 will take precedence as long as there are recovery points for DS1 on the recovery point volume.

Scenario 2: Assume protection group PG1 with retention range of 3 days has five data sources DS1 to DS5. Of these data sources DS1 is moved to PG2 that has a retention range of 4 days and DS3 is moved to PG3 that has a retention range of 5 days. Pruning of the recovery points for PG1 will follow the retention range of PG3 until there are no more recovery points of DS3 left. Then it will follow the retention range of PG2, if there are any recovery points of DS1 remaining. Finally when the recovery points of DS1 and DS3 are all pruned off, the retention range schedule will revert to PG1’s schedule.