Data Protection Manager in newer versions has a feature called "Colocation of data on tape."
This is not neccessarily handy, because it is not very predictable to tell where backups go to.
Another major lack of feature is a decent GUI where it comes to identifying offline media. Possibly you may be successfull using PowerShell, but to me this is not very pleasant.
Also - afaik - you can only select one resource at a time, so restoring a crashed server with several protected resources is a disaster to restore quickly when things burn out completely. In all, even though there are major costs involved, I still prefer BE with disater recovery options to DPM.
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by: honmapogPosted on 2008-02-16 at 02:02:59ID: 20909043
In my opinion DPM is not as good as Backup Exec when it comes to tape backup. DPM works to tape, but the allocation of media is not as flexible as in Backup Exec. For example - as far as I know - you cannot run continue a tape backup for one job onto the same tape that was written to by the previous job. This is something you can possibly work around, but as I said it's not that flexible.
You also mention a 1TB NAS from Buffalo. Not sure if that's a source of data, or your backup destination. Either way, DPM is not really compatible. If it is the source of data, you cannot use DPM - DPM requires the installation of a DPM agent. DPM is also completely based on VSS, which won't work with your NAS.
As a target of the backup, your NAS is not compatible (see http://www.microsoft.com/t
Backup Exec will work with the NAS as a "Backup to Disk" target. And it probably works to back up the NAS (although it's not officially supported and you will get warning messages in the job).
Backup Exec 11 and 12 can also do individual Exchange mailbox restore - something which DPM claims it can do, but is in practice not as easy as with Backup Exec. BE11 does not support this feature for backups to NAS though. BE12 will.
DPM on the other hand does SQL backup better than BE. The continuous replication that DPM offers for SQL is better than BE Continuous Protection Server.
Although all the above seems to favor BE, DPM is certainly a very good alternative. But not if you've got a Bufallo NAS to consider.