Data Protection Manager 2010 and System State Restore

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J.C. Hornbeck

2 Nov 2011 9:57 AM

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Hello, I’m Shane Brasher. I’d like to discuss the System State Restore Process, basically a walkthrough if you will. First however let’s discuss a high level view of what is done during the backup of a server system state.

From a very high level, Data Protection Manger (DPM) contacts the agent on a protected server and requests that a backup of the system state be performed. The target server initializes the Windows Server Backup (WSB) feature to take the snapshot and store it locally. Once the system state snapshot is successfully done, the backup is then transferred to the DPM server. The reason that understanding this is important is for a system state restore, we use this same Windows Server Backup feature to accomplish our goals. In the walkthrough below, you will see that we will use DPM to restore the System State recovery point to a network share and then on the target server use wbadmin to locate and perform the actual restore of the system state.

System State Restore Walkthrough

This environment involves:

1 member server
1 DC
1 Data Protection Manager 2010
System State Restore Process

1. Create a System State recovery point

2. Perform a restore of the System State to a network share

3. Go to the target server and via wbadmin command prompt access the System State share for the version

4. Use the version number to start the System State restore

5. Reboot

Let’s walk through the whole process.

Here we have a successful system state backup of our protected server:

Perform a restore of the System State to a network share

We go to the recovery tab to locate the recovery point to perform a restore. In this case we will restore to a share on the local DPM server. Navigating to the recovery tab in DPM and selecting the correct server and system state that we wish to restore, we right click the system state and select “recover”:

We opt to Recover to a “network folder” which is our only option in this case:

We choose a folder already created on the desktop of the DPM server:

And we opt to apply the security settings of the destination computer:

Next we are given a summary of our choices:

Finalizing our recovery, we see the progress taking place:

If we choose, we can go to the “Monitoring” tab and then the “Jobs” tab to see the disk based recovery also taking place here as well:

Now we will have to share out the folder in which we have saved the system state to. Looking at our folder structure we see the following. It is the DPM_Recovered_At_<Date and Time> folder we will have to share with “Read access”:

To keep things simple, we will share this folder with the name of “SystemState”:

And we will make sure everyone has “Read” access to it:

Using wbadmin on the target machine

We then go to the target server. Opening up the command prompt on the target server, we use the following syntax to get the version indentifier.

• Syntax: wbadmin get versions –backuptarget: <ServerWhereTheRecoveredSSResides\Share>
In our case: wbadmin get versions –backuptarget: \\DPM2010\SystemState

Example:

The output will be:

Backup time: 10/11/2011 5:05AM
Backup target: Fixed Disk labeled C:
Version identifier: 10/11/2011-12:05
Can Recover: Application(s), System State

Example: