Data Protection Manager 2006 (DPM)

Data Protection Manager is basically a "Backup to Disk" solution designed for local as also remote Backups. Due that you can control the Bandwidth used, DPM allows to protect servers that are connected over a slow WAN link, like small Branch Offices or medium locations without a local Data Center or local IT Staff.

Release History:

*Please notice that the Dates above could change. Please check Microsoft web site.

Next expected Release: DPM v2

Installation:

Please check the System pre-requisites before you start with the Installation. The System pre-requisites can be found here. I also recommend you the to read the Deployment Guide before to start with the installation.

Important: DPM supports only local Drives as "Storage Pools", that means that you can use Drives from a DAS, SAN or iSCSI Storage. Network mapped Drives are not supported. The best is to assign the expected necessary Disk capacity before you start with the Installation. The Disks should not be formatted. You can add latter more Disk Capacity but you can't remove it.

The DPM Wizard does almost everything for you, it checks the Hardware, if not installed then it installs IIS 6 as also SQL 2000 + SP3 and SQL Reporting Services with SP1, the only thing that it does not is to install the necessary VSS Hotfix KB891957 that you will need to install manually. During the installation two speciall User Accounts are created, the Microsoft$DPM$Acct (used for the connection with the SQL Server/DB) and  the Microsoft$DPMWriter$ (a low privilege account under which DPM runs the Writer Service).

Configuration:

The configuration is done over a Wizard. Three Important settings must be done:

1. Select the Disks that should be added to the Storage Pool.
2. Install the Agents on those Servers that you want to protect. Important: a restart is necessary after to install the DPM  Agent!
3. Create one or more "Protection Groups" were you define the Schedule as also how many Bandwidth should be used.

What is will come with DPM 2006 SP1 (currently in Beta):

• Support for 64 bit Servers
• Support for the protection of servers using Single Instance Store (SIS)
• Allows the protection of Clusters
• It contains a rollup with all Hot fixes released for DPM

Important Links:

KB915181 How to use System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2006 to help protect Windows SharePoint Services and Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003

KB909644 How to use Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 to help protect an Exchange server

KB910401 How to use Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006 to help protect a SQL Server database

DPM MS dev. Blog

DPM Operations Guide

DPM Error Code Catalog

Tips and Tricks:

KB911169 You receive an error message and the replica state is invalid in Data Protection Manager 2006

Some commands you can use to find out the Unsupported Data Types on the production server:

Encrypted:
C:\> cipher /s:c: | find "E "

Reparse:
C:\> dir /s | find "<JUNCTION>"

Case Sensitive Files (use this as a batch script):

@echo off
del cs.txt
dir %1 /s /b /on >files.txt
for /f "delims=" %%a in (files.txt) do call :checklastline "%%a"
goto end
:checklastline
if /I %1==%lastline% echo %1 already exists! >> cs.txt
set lastline=%1
goto end
:end

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