What is a protection group?
Published : April 8, 2005 | Updated : August 17, 2005
A protection group is a collection of data sources, such as volumes or shares, that have a common protection configuration and schedule. Data sources within a protection group are referred to as protection group members or simply members. The protection group configuration specifies the performance options that you want to enable, such as network bandwidth usage throttling and daily consistency checks. The protection schedule specifies how often to synchronize the replica with the live data on the file server and when to create shadow copies of the replica.
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. In most cases, you will want to group data with similar characteristics together.
Note
A protection group can include data sources from multiple volumes on the same file server or from multiple volumes across multiple file servers. However, different data sources on the same volume cannot be added to separate protection groups.