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.

Reliability? Can we say we're onto Stage 2?

I'm rather scared, and pleased, to say that we appear to have genuinely made it work - in my last few posts I was still sceptical that Backup Exec was just being nice to us, but it does appear it is genuinely now acting like a competent backup product.

One server has now been up for 27 days, and is still running backups quite happily, with 2,000 odd jobs run in that time (66 a day or so), and the CASO server just getting on with it's jobs and delegation. No more tears.

Our CPS system is still working - that's the most flawless part of Backup Exec I've seen. It's absolutely awesome - it says continuous protection, and it offers just that. We installed it, got over one hurdle of making it listen on a specific IP, and that was that. Our main file servers have just-below-real-time backups 24/7.

Our next challenge (Stage 2, which took 18 months to get to!) is to build a comprehensive reporting and restore testing infrastructure around the software. We want to know everything possible about what it does, so we can provide internal quality reports, ensure we meet SLAs and finally, but not least, ensure customers can be assured of regular, reliable backups.

Restore testing is often overlooked, but certainly not here! It is an essential, and core part of our plan to operate regular (hopefully scheduled) restore tests so we can be sure those backups actually work - as someone else we know found out to great cost - backing up isn't enough!