Microsoft has released the Update rollup 9 for Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 a little over one month back. This UR contains a number of significant improvements to the current DPM version thereby enabling more capabilities for your enterprise backup strategy.
Here are four reasons that you should consider to apply this UR.
No need for consistency check for file server backups in case of a DPM Filter corruption
When your production file servers encounter an unexpected downtime, DPM file tracking filter gets corrupted and results in an inconsistent replica. In UR9 DPM leverages USN journal to track the changes in files, thereby running a consistent check to repair the damaged filters is no longer needed. The repair operation will be displayed as a synchronization job in DPM which will also sync the replica to latest. Running a consistency check is really painful especially when the replica is huge.
Say Goodbye to Production Server Restart
One of the biggest headaches while upgrading the DPM agent is the requirement to restart the protected servers unlike SCOM or SCCM agents. Finally Microsoft has got rid of the restart requirement. Microsoft has eliminated all the causes for restarting servers while upgrading DPM agents except the filter driver update. Any backup products that perform incremental backups use a filter driver, and whenever there is an update to the filter driver a reboot is needed. If you are already on UR6 or above you can easily upgrade your DPM agents without the restart requirement. So unless any future UR doesn’t contain a filter driver update no restart required at all.
Cache Space for Online Backup has been reduced
In previous versions of Microsoft Azure Backup Agent local disk cache space requirement was 15% of the data source size for backup to Azure which is a big issue if your data source is over 10 TB. This has been reduced to 5% now.
Number of Recovery Points for Online Backups has been increased
For organizations with strict industry compliance requirements the need to have longer retention policies is a mandatory requirement. DPM now supports 9999 recovery points for a online backup in Azure where previously it was 366. This enables more flexible and consistent recovery policies for cloud backup.
You can refer the full KB article and download the binaries for UR9 package from here.