In the previous three posts in this series, I discussed how to be proactive and what to do when faced with the possibility of legal inquiry. Part 4 will focus on the steps necessary to restore a mailbox database from Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM) and prepare it for search.

If your inquiry will be done on a live database, this step of the process is not necessary. However; there are several scenarios where you’d want to perform the inquiry on a snapshot of the mailbox database from a previous point in time.

Exchange 2007

Create Recovery Storage Group

The first step is to use the Database Recovery Assistant to create a recovery storage group. This will provide a place to restore the database from DPM.

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Paul Schnackenburg talks to Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager at Microsoft and Frederique Dennison, Product Marketing Manager – Security and Management at Microsoft about the Systems Center Suite, Systems Center Configuration Manager vNext, Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, Disaster Recovery and backup over the wire, small business backup and the Tech Ed Australia 2010 experience.

PS Congratulations on becoming Technical Product Manager for Systems Center Operations Manager, you’re sort of straddling three products now. That would be a pretty big load?

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SP1 for DPM 2007 has some interesting features. Most important is probably Hyper-V support. It is now available for download:

DPM 2007 SP1 (32bit)

DPM 2007 SP1 (64bit)

And here some more useful links:

What’s New in DPM 2007 Service Pack 1

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Some days ago, the IT forum published a presentation from Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager for storage solutions at Microsoft, about the new features of Data Protection Manager 2007 Service Pack 1. The video also introduces DPM 2007 and the recently released Feature Pack. The most interesting part is certainly about the enhancement that SP1 will bring. I copied here the main parts of the presentation:

SQL Server backup

• SQL Server 2008 Protection for mirrored databases now includes backup on failover
• Ability to backup databases in parallel within same instance

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Data Protection Manager 2007 RC is finally out. I have been waiting for this already for some time. Just some days ago, we had a serious problem with our current backup solution, Symantec Backup Exec. We didn’t renew our service contract with Symantec because I am seriously considering moving to DPM 2007.

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Jason Buffington, the “Data Protection Guy” at Microsoft explains the difference between DPM 2006 and DPM 2007 (Data Protection Manager) with respect to continuous data protection. Whereas DPM 2006 uses a file system filter “to grab a copy of the file operation”, DPM 2007 uses a VSS writer (Volume Shadow Copy Service) instead.

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I was quite surprised when someone from Microsoft told me that DPM v2 Beta 1 not only allows backups of Exchange, SQL Server, and SharePoint, but also supports tape libraries. This would make DPM v2 a serious competitor to backup tools like Symantec Backup Exec or CA ARCserve. It made me quite curious to try DPM v2. Microsoft’s latest CDP solution certainly is an interesting backup tool. However, Beta 1 has one major shortcoming.

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Service Pack 1 for DPM 2006 is now available. It is interesting that SP1 was released after the beta for Version 2. I didn’t test yet DPM 2006 Version 2, but it is still on my to-do-list. The new features of DPM 2006 SP1 might be of interest for you, if you already work with Microsoft’s backup software:

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I was quite surprised when I found out about this today. I didn’t expect that Microsoft Data Protection Manager (DPM) will support backups of Exchange, Sharepoint and SQL Server before 2008. I tested DPM 2006 thoroughly and wrote an article about it in the German print magazine iX. Although I like Microsoft’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) solution, I found several shortcomings.

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Yesterday, I discussed the Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager’s (DPM) advantages over traditional disk-based backup software. However, DPM also has some disadvantages. Some of these shortcomings are related to the fact that DPM is a CDP solution; or to the fact that it is just version 1.0.

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This article is part of the series about continuous data protection (CDP). In the first article I introduced the concept of CDP. I recommend reading the article first, before you continue. This article discusses Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2006 as one example of a CDP system. Today, I will focus on its advantages over traditional disk-based backup systems. In the next article of this series I will talk about the disadvantages. I recently published an article about the DPM in the German magazine iX. My German readers can get the complete review there.

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