Protecting Windows Clients with Data Protection Manager

Good session presented by two clearly passionate product managers. Quick survey of the room showed 50% were trying to backup up laptops/desktops but not one person was happy with their solution. Why?

• Mobile users cause problems
• Sheer volume of machines - how manage that data and scale policies across it?
• Each user has different needs.

DPM 2010 released his week addresses these! They have removed any reliance on the end user and support user roaming and customisation. You can still enforce Admin defined restrictions.

Basics - first backup is a full backup, every future is the disk block changes - in essence allowing you to have a full backup each time, whilst only moving small amounts of data from the device to the DPM server. You can do multiple backups during the day to allow users to restore previous versions of files as they work. If they are offsite it backs up locally, sure if a disk fails you are stuck, but if they just want to restore any earlier version, they can still do this. Once back on network/vpn/directaccess it will sync with the DPM server.

Policy can configure backup locations, you can allow the users to add their own (or not). For example I have a bad habit of saving in progress files to my desktop and typically My Documents would be the location backed up - I could add my desktop to the locations to protect.

User can also choose to sync just before they go offsite, and do self recovery. If they lose their laptop you can restore to a new machine with their login, or if they just need a file, they can login to any machine and get what they need. I.e someone forgets their USB stick with their powerpoint.

The agent can be installed as part of a standard build, you only pay license costs when you start to do backups. This would be great as a premium service on top of SDS. Or a direct replacement for SDS backup.

A couple of flaws, each DPM server can only cater to 1000 clients, so assuming we need to run this from the datacenter, we would need significant server investment. Lets hope this becomes a cloud offering in the future!