Recovery process

The method of data protection, disk-based or tape-based, makes no difference to the recovery task. You select the recovery point of data that you want to recover, and DPM recovers the data to the protected computer.

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. When storage area limits have been reached and the retention range for the existing recovery points is not met yet, protection jobs will fail.

Note
To support end-user recovery, the recovery points for files are limited to 64 by Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

DPM creates recovery points for file data by taking a shadow copy of the replica on a schedule that you configure. For application data, each synchronization and express full backup creates a recovery point.

The following illustration shows how each protection group member is associated with its own replica volume and recovery point volume.

Protection Group Members, Replicas, and Recovery Points

Administrators recover data from available recovery points by using the Recovery Wizard in DPM Administrator Console. When you select a data source and point in time from which to recover, DPM notifies you if the data is on tape, whether the tape is online or offline, and which tapes are needed to complete the recovery.

DPM gives administrators the ability to enable their end users to perform their own recoveries by leveraging the Previous Versions feature in Windows. If you do not want to provide this capability to your end users, you recover the data for desktop computers using the using the Recovery Wizard.