What Is a Protection Policy?
Applies To: System Center Data Protection Manager 2010
Based on the recovery goals that you specify for a protection group, Data Protection Manager (DPM) configures the protection policy, or schedule of jobs, for that protection group. The following are examples of recovery goals:
“Lose no more than 1 hour of production data.”
“Provide me with a retention range of 30 days.”
“Make data available for recovery for 7 years.”
“Tell me when the data on these tapes expires.”
“I need faster recovery times for applications.”
Your recovery goals quantify your organization's data protection requirements. In DPM, the recovery goals are defined by the configuration of retention range, data loss tolerance, and recovery point schedule. DPM provides default settings for the recovery goals; however, you can modify each or all of the settings.
The retention range defines how long you need the backed-up data available. For example, do you need data from today to be available a week from now? Two weeks from now? A year from now?
Data loss tolerance is the maximum amount of data loss, measured in time, that is acceptable to business requirements, and it determines how often DPM should synchronize with the protected computer by collecting data changes from the protected computer. You can change the synchronization frequency to any interval between 15 minutes and 24 hours. You can also select to synchronize just before a recovery point is created, rather than on a specified time schedule.
The recovery point schedule establishes how many recovery points of this protection group should be created. For file protection, you select the days and times for which you want recovery points created. For application data protection, the synchronization frequency determines the recovery point schedule.
The combination of recovery points, synchronization, and retention range results in a protection plan—that is, a schedule of jobs to achieve your recovery goals.