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Data Protection Manager

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Important

This version of Data Protection Manager (DPM) has reached the end of support. We recommend you to upgrade to DPM 2022.

Every organization needs a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) strategy to ensure resources are available during planned and unplanned outages. Your BCDR strategy requires keeping your data safe and recoverable, and keeping your business workloads, applications, and services continuously available. System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) is a robust enterprise backup and recovery system that contributes to your BCDR strategy by facilitating the backup and recovery of enterprise data.

You can deploy System Center DPM for:

  • Application-aware backup: Application-aware back up of Microsoft workloads, including SQL Server, Exchange, and SharePoint.

  • File backup: Back up files, folders, and volumes for computers running Windows server and Windows client operating systems.

  • System backup: Back up system state or run full, bare-metal backups of physical computers running Windows server or Windows client operating systems.

  • Virtual Machine backup: Back up Hyper-V or VMware virtual machines (VM) running Windows or Linux. You can back up an entire VM or run application-aware backups of Microsoft workloads on Hyper-V/VMware VMs running Windows.

  • Get a full list of What can DPM back up?

DPM can store backup data to:

  • Disk: For short-term storage, DPM backs up data to disk pools.

  • Azure: For both short-term and long-term storage, off-premises, DPM data stored in disk pools can be backed up to the Microsoft Azure cloud using the Azure Backup service.

  • Tape: For long-term storage, you can back up data to tape, which can then be stored offsite.

When outages occur and source data is unavailable, you can use DPM to easily restore data to the original source or to an alternate location. That way, if the original data is unavailable because of planned or unexpected issues, you can easily restore data from an alternate location. DPM uses SQL Server as its database, and you protect the DPM server itself for disaster recovery purposes. The following diagram provides an overview of DPM backup functionality.

Diagram of DPM backup workflow.

Next steps

Learn more in How does DPM work?