Tapeless Data Protection Manager 2007 Strategy

(If you’re wanting some info on deploying DPM 2007, I suggest reading this first…)

Microsoft’s System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (DPM 2007) ideally should be installed on it’s own server, and connected to a tape drive or library for long term backups.

Without a tape library, if your DPM server dies, you can’t restore the data it’s been protecting because the configuration and database has the catalog information.

If long term backups isn’t part of your backup strategy, there is an alternative – dpmbackup.exe

The dpmbackup.exe tool is a command line option packaged with DPM 2007 that allows you to backup up the configuration and database out to a file which can be restored from the command line also. I’ve set up a scheduled task to run this command and to robocopy the data off to an external disk at a regular interval.

As my protection is between every 15 minutes (for Exchange) and every 1 hour (for other servers and data), I have very short term restore options available to me, from between 15 minutes and 5 days (my retention period), but I back up my DPM config every 8 hours. This means that if I was unlucky enough to lose my Exchange server and DPM server entirely in one go, theoretically 8 hours would be the oldest backup I’d need to restore from.

Here’s my very basic script…

dpmbackup -db
robocopy “C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\Database Backups” “E:\DPM\DB” /E /COPYALL
robocopy “C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Config” “E:\DPM\Config” /E /COPYALL