DPM 2012 – Page 3 – Buchatech.com

System Center Universe 2012

January 12, 2012 by sbuchanan

System Center Universe 2012 is a one-day globally available technical event which will focus on the System Center 2012 products and new capabilities resulting from these releases. The conference begins at 8:00 am CST on Thursday, January 19th, 2012. Jason Buffington will be presenting about Data Protection Manager 2012. Here is a link to the … Read more

Backing up System State of Windows 7 with DPM

December 7, 2011 by sbuchanan

Yes the title of this post is misleading. That was intentional. I have seen many fellow IT Pros in the community asking if backing up system state of Windows clients is possible with DPM 2010. Well it is not and it will not be possible with DPM 2012 either. DPM was designed to protect client data but not the machine entirely. DPM does a great job of protecting client data but there is a real need in some environments to protect client PC’s as a whole.

There is not an officially supported solution for this but there is a work around to protect the entire client.

For XP clients you could backup system state of your XP machines to a network share or folder and then have DPM pick it up from there.

Windows Vista/7 does not have a system state backup option. That was replaced with “Complete PC Back up”. Complete PC Back up in Windows Vista/7 is an image of the computer so it achieves a similar goal to system state. You can schedule to run the Complete PC Back up out to a folder or network share and then let DPM pick it up from there.

Again this is not ideal but it is a good alternative when you need complete protection of your client.

Here is the process to set this up on Windows 7.

Go to Start>>>Control Panel>>>Backup and Restore

Note that Windows backup has not been setup yet.

Click on Set up backup.

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The Windows Backup wizard will start. This can take a while to open so be patient here.

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DPM 2012 Book Feedback

November 10, 2011 by sbuchanan

Hello DPM Community, This is Steve here. I recently published a book on DPM 2010. I have been fortunate to team up with Microsoft DPM MVP’s Robert Hedblom and Islam Gomaa to write a DPM 2012 book. We are in the planning stages for this book. We would like to know from the community what … Read more

Better Reporting in DPM through Prism

October 30, 2011 by sbuchanan

Reporting for DPM has been a problem for many DPM administrators. You need better reporting on scheduled backup jobs, success/failures of backup jobs, details on tape jobs, SLA reports, and more. Your only other option was to create custom reports in DPM using the SQL views that come with DPM. I posted on how to do this a while back here:
https://www.buchatech.com/2011/01/building-custom-reports-in-dpm/.

Working with SQL views is not the easiest way to get custom reports if you are new to or not savvy with SQL Reporting services. Well the alternative to this is Prism.

A company named Bocada has developed a product called Prism that helps you get better reporting out of your backup solutions. They have a flavor for DPM. The nice folks at Bocada gave me a demo of this product live in action. Thanks Ralph!

I am going to give you some more details about Prism for DPM in this post.

There are many pros to Prism and only a couple of cons. One of the cons is that you still cannot bring the custom reports into the DPM console. They are however web based and easy enough to access.
There still is a slight learning curve to learn how to customize reports.

Prism is a stand alone product that is deployed on a server and accessed via a web browser. It runs on top of IIS and accesses the DPM data directly through the DPM SQL database. Once Prism has collected information about DPM it is able to present the information as reports.

Prism can be setup to gather information from multiple DPM servers for reporting therefore it can be used in enterprises with many DPM servers.

Brocada teamed up with Microsoft to create two default DPM specific reports in conjunction with reporting DPM related data in Prism. These reports are:

Recovery Point Summary
Recovery Point Summary provides a summary of the number of Non-expired recovery points, Date of the last non-expired recovery point and the average recovery point in Range for all the clients being protected.

Recovery Point Status
Recovery Point Status lets you see the various success or failures of your daily recovery points.

How to exclude data from DPM protection

October 23, 2011 by sbuchanan

THE NEED: In DPM you may run into scenarios where you are backing up a folder or a volume and there are folders or sub-folders that you actually don’t need or want to protect. There is a way to “exclude” these from the backup. Before we talk about how to do this lets look at … Read more

DPM & VSS

October 23, 2011 by sbuchanan

DPM’s data protection is facilitated by the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS). Therefore VSS is the secret sauce. VSS is in OS’s and Microsoft applications such as Exchange, SharePoint, and Hyper-V have their own VSS writers. Yes this may be old news as the VSS technology has been around for some time but many IT … Read more

Free Webcast: Whats New in DPM 2012

October 13, 2011 by sbuchanan

Microsoft DPM MVP Robert Hedblom will be hosting a free webcast covering what the new features are in DPM 2012. Here is the information from his blog: Interested in DPM? Want to know the new features in DPM2012? At the 13/10 1PM GMT+1 I will host a webcast (Live meeting) that addresses the new features … Read more

DPM Admin Console on Client Computers

August 8, 2022September 17, 2011 by sbuchanan

DPM 2012 Beta is out. One of the new features of DPM 2012 is that you can install the DPM Administrator Console on other servers or workstations and manage your DPM 2012 and even DPM 2010 servers remotely without having to logon to the DPM server. The cool part is that you can manage existing DPM 2010 servers. This is done through applying a hotfix to your DPM 2010 server and installing the console on your workstation or server from the DPM 2012 beta software.

In this blog post we are going to walk through setting this up. It is a simple two step install installing the hotfix on the DPM 2010 server first and then the console on the workstation. Here is the process:

First download the DPM 2010 Interoperability patch for DPM 2012 Beta hotfix (DataProtectionManager2010-KB2581742) and DPM 2012 Beta.

DPM 2010 hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2581742
DPM 2012 Beta: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27216

Copy the DPM 2010 Interoperability patch hotfix for DPM 2012 Beta to your DPM 2010 server.

Make sure your DPM 2010 is all up to date. Once DPM 2010 is up to date install the beta hotfix.

Open up DPM 2010 after the hotfix and verify it is still working.

Now the DPM 2010 server is ready lets install the console on the client machine.

Here are the steps:

Navigate to the DPM 2012 Beta install and chose 32 or 64Bit depending on what your workstation is.

Launch the DPM 2012 Beta install on your local workstation.

Select “DPM Central Console” to begin.

Publish DPM Alerts to Windows Event Viewer

September 13, 2011 by sbuchanan

I recently ran across a thread on DPM TechNet forums with a topic on how to access DPM alerts. They wanted to monitor DPM errors and events. You can use a third party tool to do this or you can use System Center Operations Manager/Essentials . If you have the option to use System Center … Read more

Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2012 Beta

September 1, 2011 by sbuchanan

Data Protection Manager 2012 Beta is Now Available! You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=897a604a-cace-42b9-944d-4c690917f989 For more information about DPM 2012 visit: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2011/09/01/system-center-data-protection-manager-2012-beta-now-available.aspx and Whats new in DPM 2012 Screencast by DPM MVP Mike Resseler http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/Video/hh285690