What Are Your Goals for Recovery?

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Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

In planning for data protection, you must set realistic recovery goals for each data source that you will protect. Not all information or data maintained on your company's computers requires equal protection, nor does all of it merit the same investment in protection. Your deployment plan should establish recovery goals for each data source according to your business needs for protection of that data.

In DPM, you set your recovery goals in terms of synchronization frequency, recovery point schedule, and retention range, as follows:

  • Synchronization frequency should be selected based on your data loss tolerance*,* or how much data you can lose. You can specify the synchronization for a protection group to occur as frequently as every 15 minutes. You can also specify less frequent synchronizations. At a minimum, DPM must synchronize the replicas for a protection group at least once between recovery points.

  • The recovery point schedule establishes how many recovery points of this data should be created and when. A recovery point is the date and time of a version of a data source that is available for recovery from media that is managed by DPM.

  • The retention range is how long you need the backed-up data available. To determine your retention range needs, consider the pattern of recovery requests you experience in your enterprise. If requests are concentrated within two weeks of data loss, 10 days might be an appropriate retention range for you. If requests are concentrated at a later time, you might need a longer retention range.

For example, your recovery goals for a specific Exchange Server database could be that the most recent data is never more than 30 minutes old, that you can select from versions created at 30-minute intervals, that it will be available for recovery from disk for 14 days, and that it will be available for recovery from tape for 3 years.

See Also

Concepts

Planning Protection Configurations
Recovery Goals for Disk-Based Protection
Recovery Goals for Tape-Based Protection
What Do You Want to Protect?