Why DPM 2010 and Windows Client Desktop or Laptop are Better Together?
Many companies estimate that nearly 50% of their data resides only on someone’s laptop, which is often travelling or remote to any company datacenter.
PC administrators are looking for a better way to protect and recover Windows® laptops. Microsoft has heard from our customers and partners and delivered a complete solution with System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010.
Maximizing Protection of Microsoft Windows with Microsoft Data Protection Manager
New in DPM 2010 is the ability to protect workstations and laptops, especially the “disconnected” laptop of the remote or travelling employee. DPM is designed for an IT generalist and uses wizards and workflows to help ensure that you can protect your data – without requiring an advanced degree, training or certification in storage and backup technologies.
DPM allows you to select client data types such as “My Documents” or “Desktop” to be included or excluded from protection, as well as file types such as MP3 or WMV. After you select the kinds of data that you want to protect, DPM will locate the specific directories on each PC for protection
There are two mode of protection, Online Protection and Offline Protection:
Online Protection
While your laptops are on the corporate network, or remotely connected via a VPN or Direct Access, the DPM server will protect the laptops to the DPM disk, and then potentially to DPM tape, another DPM server offsite, as well as to cloud providers that are partnered with Microsoft DPM.
Offline Protection
After choosing data types for protection and setting the retention and synchronization schedule, the DPM server sends the protection policy to each laptop so that protection happens while you are disconnected from the corporate network.
Flexible User Protection
While you can define a corporate policy such as “My Doc’s” and “Desktop” for protection, you can also optionally choose to enable end users to add additional directories on their local machines for protection.
In this way, users do not have to change their work flow, reinstall applications or move data within their hard drives in order to have their key data directories protected by the DPM 2010 server.
How to Restore Client Data with DPM
DPM 2010 provides three data restore methods, based on scenario:
- From the DPM server, you can use the DPM Administration Console to browse any recovery points on the DPM server and restore the data from disk or tape, to any network file share or directory.
- From the Windows client’s DPM applet, you can open an entire recovery point (all data from a previous point in time) so that you can browse directories and restore large amounts of data. This can also be done between machines, so that from LaptopB, you can browse any recovery points from LaptopA that you had access to (for migration or replacement scenarios).
- From the Windows client’s Windows Explorer or Microsoft Office, you can restore individual files or directories using the ‘Previous Versions Client’ technology built into Windows 7 and Vista (or installable onto Windows XP).