Wednesday 27 April 2011

DPM - File Restores in Seconds, not minutes

As part of our deployment of Data Protection Manager (DPM) 2010, we decided we wanted to do as much restore testing as we could. So having contacted our usual customers who help us test and prove anything (call it a focus group if you want), we asked them all to delete random sets of files from the various servers we're backing up using DPM for them.

Obviously we asked them to make sure the files were not critical or important (just in case, safety first naturally!) - and then just tell us what files they wanted back. The theory being we should be able to do this without knowing in advance whats being deleted (ensuring nobody here could take extra backups or look out for anything etc).

Guess what, it worked... first time, and it is very fast. By comparison to Backup Exec, which took a minimum of 3-4 minutes even for a single 100KB Word Document (because of the whole loading media nonsense...), it did the job quickly, very quickly.

Where Backup Exec is more flexible however is if you want to restore a random set of files from a single file in different folders - DPM doesn't appear to let you do this - so I'd have to select files in a single folder, run "Recover..." then repeat for each folder (well through the UI anyhow). However, given the restore takes literally a few seconds, I'm not sure we care too much - and in reality doing this is pretty rare - normally we want a whole folder or a group of files in a folder or similar, rather than completely random odd and sods files from across a server.

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