Specifying Your Short-Term Protection Goals
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
DPM generates a protection plan using your short-term recovery goals. You define your short-term recovery goals by selecting a retention range for your data, specifying how frequently you want the data synchronized, and scheduling the creation of your selected recovery points. A recovery point is a snapshot or point-in-time copy of the data sources that are protected by your DPM server.
Retention range is the duration of time for which the data should be available for recovery. DPM retains recovery points for the duration specified in the retention range. Any day that the replica is not consistent does not count toward the retention range. When DPM protection is stopped temporarily because the replica is inconsistent, DPM does not delete expired recovery points until protection resumes.
To specify short-term protection goals
On the Specify Short-Term Goals page, in the Retention range box, select the duration of time that you want the data to be available for recovery.
You can select a retention range between 1 and 64 days for short-term disk-based protection.
In the Synchronization frequency section, do one of the following:
Select Every, and then select the frequency at which you want to synchronize the replica on your DPM server with the changes on your protected server. For application data protection, the synchronization frequency also determines the recovery point schedule. You can select a synchronization frequency interval of anywhere from 15 minutes to 24 hours.
The default behavior is every 15 minutes, which means that the DPM server will never be more than 15 minutes behind the computer it is protecting. The average Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is 15 minutes from any event that critically impacts the computer or disk.
Select Just before a recovery point to synchronize the data just before a scheduled recovery point.
When you select this option, recovery points for all protection group members are created according to the schedule you configure. The network traffic is potentially greater at the time of synchronization when you select this option.
For more information about synchronization, in the DPM 2010 Operations Guide, see Managing Performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=178445).
To specify the recovery points for the selected data sources:
Recovery points for files. Click Modify to change the recovery point schedule for file data. Recovery points for files are created according to the schedule you configure.
Application recovery points. Click to create recovery points for application data after each synchronization. For data protection of applications that do not support incremental backups, such as SQL Server databases using the simple recovery model, the express full backup schedule determines the recovery point schedule.
Express full backup. Click Modify to change the express full backup schedule. To enable faster recovery time, DPM regularly performs an express full backup, which is a type of synchronization that updates the replica to include the changed blocks.
Note
Performing frequent express full backups may impact performance on the protected server. For more information about express full backups, in the DPM 2010 Operations Guide, see Managing Performance (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=178445).
DPM can store a maximum of 64 recovery points for each file member of a protection group. For application data sources, DPM can store up to 448 express full backups and up to 96 incremental backups for each express full backup. To support end-user recovery, the recovery points for files are limited to 64 by Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
On the Modify Recovery Points screen, specify the times of the day and the days of the week that you want to create a recovery point, and then click OK.
On the Specify Short-Term Goals page, click Next.