Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager 2006

Comprehensible Reports

Like most Microsoft products, DPM has an easy-to-use interface. What's more, it give you a leg up in reporting. The "Administrator Recovery" report is a case in point: So clearly does it show how much money was saved by not having to haul out tapes, even a CEO can understand it.

Of course, the purpose of all disk-to-disk backup products is to copy your data to another location. DPM does that by running copies to a disk accessible to the DPM server, then tracking changes in the files. The product works as advertised, and as an administrator I could tell it to protect disks on any number of networked machines, as long as there was room for the full size of the disks on the backup target. I told it to protect the data on one local and one SAN drive on a machine, and to do backup to a local disk on the DPM Server. It worked like a charm.

Data Protection Manager 2006 Reporting Click to Enlarge

Unfortunately, I had to dig in order to find the disk space requirements--they weren't indicated in the GUI. Despite the fact that my Drive X and Machine Y were the same size, I was surprised to find there wasn't enough space to back up my drive. I clicked on "change" from the GUI and got a list showing the size of the following was being reserved at the destination site: Replication Area, Shadow Copy Area, Synchronization Logs and Transfer Logs. I was able to adjust the values, but there's an awful lot of overhead here that could have gone somewhere other than the target disk--the logs, for example, are placed automatically on the target disk, and no mechanism is provided to move them.