Hey All,

On the DPM newsgroup (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/dataprotectionmanager) there was a very interesting thread the last few days.  One of the users asked if it was possible to include all volumes into a Bare Metal Recovery

As you might know, Bare Metal Recovery only protects the critical volumes (boot + system + volumes hosting files of server roles), so if you have a volume with applications or user data or whatever, you need to protect it also.  Now that is not a problem because you can choose BMR and also the additional volumes

Now the user said that this was not OK, because in a disaster, he wanted to recover as quickly as possible.

Luckily, Praveen D [MSFT] found out a good solution, one which I think can be very helpful in some cases, so here goes…

DPM uses windows backup to do the job.  So in your DPM\bin folder, you will find a file called BmrBackup.cmd.  Inside this cmd you will find the command that drives windows backup.

With BMR, you will see something like:

start  /WAIT %SystemRoot%\system32\wbadmin.exe start backup -allcritical -quiet -backuptarget:%1

If you add the option –include:VolumeLetter:,VolumeLetter: then you add your volumes in the BMR.  Don’t forget to increase the volumes for your replica and recovery point volumes.

Thanks Praveen

Cheers,

Mike Resseler

Read the complete post at http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/05/28/bare-metal-recovery-how-to-add-all-volumes.aspx