Selecting Data for Protection

Published : April 8, 2005 | Updated : August 17, 2005

DPM protects file data from loss or corruption by providing short-term disk-based backups. DPM is designed to protect up to 6 terabytes of data, from as many as 30 file servers. You can protect volumes (those that can be accessed through either drive letters or mount points), folders, and shares.

The simplest approach to selecting data for protection is to select all file data that you include in your current backups. Alternatively, you can select only specific subsets of your data for protection.

The principal factor to consider when selecting data is your need to quickly recover point-in-time copies of the data if data is lost or corrupted. Key candidates for protection are files that change frequently. Other good candidates are files that are frequently accessed, regardless of how often they change.

If you plan to archive file server data to tape from the DPM server, we recommend that you protect all the data that you include in your current backups. For information about archiving file server data from the DPM server, see “Planning for Disaster Recovery” in the “Planning a Deployment” chapter of this guide. For information about restoring a file server that has been archived using DPM, see the DPM 2006 Operations Guide (https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=46363).