Creating a Protection Group on the Client Computer
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
To add a client computer using the Create New Protection Group Wizard
On the Welcome page, click Next.
On the Select Protection Group page, select Clients, and then click Next.
On the Select Group Members page, select the computers you want to protect from the list box. Click Add to move the computers to the Selected computers list box, and then click Next. When selecting the computers you want to protect, note the following:
If you want to add multiple computers, you can create a .txt file containing the computers you want to add. To add the computers, click Add Multiple Computers. You must enter each computer in the file on a new line. We recommend that you provide the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) of the target computers. For example, enter multiple computers in a .txt file as follows:
Comp1.abc.domain.com
Comp2.abc.domain.com
Comp3.abc.domain.com
If DPM cannot find any of the computers that you specified in the .txt file or that you entered in the Text file location box, the failed set of computers is placed in a log file. Click the Failed to add machines link at the bottom of the page to open the log file.
On the Specify Inclusions and Exclusions page, specify the folders to include or exclude for protection on the selected computers. To select from a list of well-known folders, such as Documents, click the drop-down list.
When specifying inclusions and exclusions, note the following:
When you exclude a folder, and then specify a separate inclusion rule for a subfolder, DPM does not backup the subfolder. The exclusion rule overrides the inclusion rule.
When you include a folder, and then specify a separate exclude rule for a subfolder, DPM backs up the entire folder, except for the excluded subfolder.
When you include a well-known folder such as Documents, DPM locates the Documents folder for all users on the computer, and then applies the rule. For example, if the user profile for computer Comp1 contains the Documents folder for both User1 and User2, DPM will back up both folders.
Type the folder names in the Folder column using variables such as programfiles, or you can use the exact folder name. Select Include or Exclude for each entry in the Rule column.
Select Allow users to specify protection members to give your end users the choice to add more folders on the computer that they want to back up. However, the files and folders you have explicitly excluded as an administrator cannot be selected by the end user.
Under File type exclusions specify the file types to exclude using their file extensions, and then click Next to continue.
Figure 1 shows an example of how you can use the Specify Inclusions and Exclusions page to include and exclude specific folders. In this example the My Documents folder is selected for protection and the Temporary Internet Files folder is excluded from protection.
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On the Select Data Protection Method page, in the Protection Group Name box, type a name for the protection group.
In the Protection method section, select if you want to use short-term disk-based protection or long-term tape-based protection. Click Next to continue.
Note
DPM supports short-term disk-based protection for desktop and laptop computers, as well as long-term tape-based protection. DPM does not support short-term tape-based backup for desktop and laptop computers.
On the Specify Goals page, specify your protection goals such as retention range and synchronization frequency. Select the Alerting option to receive alerts when the recovery points fails for the selected number of days, and then click Next.
On the Allocate Storage page, specify the size of data to be protected on the computer. We recommend that you co-locate multiple data sources to one DPM replica volume.
Note
We recommend that you co-locate your data if you have a large number of client computers. You will not be able to protect 1000 or more client computers with one DPM server without co-locating your data. We recommend that you do not co-locate if you have less than ten client computers in a protection group.
Select the Automatically grow the volumes check box to automatically grow volumes when more disk space is required for protecting data on the client computers. Click Next to continue.
On the Summary page, review your selections and then click Create Group to complete the wizard.