What Is a Protection Group?
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
A protection group is a collection of data sources, such as volumes, shares, or Exchange Server storage groups, which have a common protection configuration. Data sources within a protection group are referred to as protection group members or simply members. The protection group configuration encapsulates the data backup targets (disk or tape ), the protection schedule that specifies how often to synchronize the replica with the live data on the protected computer and when to create recovery points of the replica and the performance options that you want to enable such as on-the-wire compression and daily consistency checks.
Some of the factors you should consider when deciding how to organize your data into protection groups are the business requirements of your organization, network performance, and the characteristics of the data. Consider, for example, how often the data changes, how rapidly the data size increases, and how critical it is to be able to recover a very recent copy of lost data. You might also want to consider how frequently you need to back up the data to tape, which data needs to be encrypted or compressed, and the number of backup copies you need available. In most cases, you will want to group data with similar characteristics together.
To help you in designing a storage layout for DPM, you can use a Storage Calculator that focuses on outlining the storage capacity requirements based on a set of input factors. For more information, see Storage Calculators for DPM (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=180658).
The following table shows the data sources that Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) protects and the level of data that you can recover using DPM.
Product | Protectable Data | Recoverable Data |
---|---|---|
|
Storage group |
|
Exchange Server 2010 |
Exchange database |
|
|
|
|
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 |
|
|
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 |
|
|
|
Farm |
Note Granular recoveries can be performed without a recovery farm. |
|
|
|
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 |
|
|
Microsoft Hyper-V in x64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 R2 |
Virtual machines on the following deployments of Hyper-V:
|
|
Microsoft Hyper-V in x64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 |
Virtual machines on the following deployments of Hyper-V:
|
|
Client computers –desktops and laptops running:
|
|
|
Bare Metal Recovery (BMR) for computers that are running Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 Note To perform BMR operations on computers that are running Windows Server 2003, install DPM System Recovery Tool (SRT) |
BMR |
BMR and System State |
System State for computers that are running Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 |
System State |
System State |
After a data source is added to a protection group, the data source is described as a member of the group. Before you can start protecting data, you must create at least one protection group. For more information about protection groups, see Planning Protection Groups (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=179370).
See Also
Concepts
What Is a Consistency Check?
What Is a Recovery Point?
What Is a Replica?
What Is Synchronization?