Disk-Based Protection Process

Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010

To provide disk-based data protection, the DPM server creates and maintains a replica, or copy, of the data that is on protected servers. The replicas are stored in the storage pool which consists of a set of disks on the DPM server, or on a custom volume. The following illustration shows the basic relationship between a protected volume and its replica.

Replica Creation

Whether you are protecting file data or application data, protection begins with the creation of the replica of the data source.

The replica is synchronized, or updated, at regular intervals according to the settings that you configure. The method that DPM uses to synchronize the replica depends on the type of data being protected. For more information, see The File Data Synchronization Process and The Application Data Synchronization Process. If a replica is identified as being inconsistent, DPM performs a consistency check, which is a block-by-block verification of the replica against the data source.

A simple example of a protection configuration consists of a DPM server and a protected computer. The computer is protected when you install a DPM protection agent on the computer and add its data to a protection group.

Protection agents track changes to protected data and transfer the changes to the DPM server. The protection agent also identifies data on a computer that can be protected and is involved in the recovery process. You must install a protection agent on each computer that you want to protect by using DPM. Protection agents can be installed by DPM or you can install protection agents manually using applications such as Systems Management Server (SMS).

Protection groups are used to manage the protection of data sources on computers. A protection group is a collection of data sources that share the same protection configuration. The protection configuration is the collection of settings that are common to a protection group, such as the protection group name, protection policy, disk allocations, and replica creation method.

DPM stores a separate replica for each protection group member in the storage pool. A protection group member can be any of the following data sources:

• A volume, share, or folder on a desktop computer, file server, or server cluster

• A storage group on an Exchange server or server cluster

• A database of an instance of SQL Server or server cluster

See Also

Concepts

The Application Data Synchronization Process
The Difference Between File Data and Application Data
The File Data Synchronization Process