File Data on Servers and Workstations

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

You can protect volumes that can be accessed through either drive letters or mount points, folders, and shares.

The simplest approach to selecting data for protection is to select all file data that you include in your current backups. Alternatively, you can select only specific subsets of your data for protection.

The principal factor to consider when selecting data is your need to quickly recover point-in-time copies of the data if data is lost or corrupted. Key candidates for protection are files that change frequently. Other good candidates are files that are frequently accessed, regardless of how often they change.

Important

Although volumes on file servers are typically formatted as NTFS, which is required for DPM protection, it is not uncommon for volumes on workstations to be formatted as FAT or FAT32. To protect these volumes, you must convert them to NTFS. For instructions, see How to Convert FAT Disks to NTFS (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=83022).

See Also

Concepts

File and Folder Exclusion
Protecting Data in DFS Namespaces
Unsupported Data Types
What Do You Want to Protect?