Hello,

Due to some severe tape issues, we have lost a lot of our long-term storage data.

I schedule a recovery point on our servers every Friday, once a week.  We retain this data for the 64 weeks (the maximum amount of versions DPM allows.)

Management needs me to put one recovery point from each month to tape (preferably from the beginning of each month.)

From the DPM console, I have been manually searching each server and running a recovery job from each "short term" recovery point we still have in the system.   I am recovering this data to a large disk array that I'm using as a staging area.  My intention is to take this data and put it onto tape using DPM and leave it there forever (20 years.)

Since the space on the array is limited, I can only recover a few months at a time before having to delete the recoevered data to make way for the next group.

The way DPM works it seems you must have a protection group for every backup job you run;  so if I have to repeat this process 8 times, I'll end up with 8 different protection groups all assigned to the host running the staging array.  NOTE:  the host running the staging array will be wiped in the near future.

What would be the best method to carry this task out ?

This forum post is similar, but doesn't address all these additional groups created:

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/f379740c-4507-4a82-b275-c95e3e968b57/dpm-2012-r2-perform-one-time-backup?forum=dataprotectionmanager

Any assistance would be welcome!

Hi,

What you can do is protect the staging server by using a single share - lets call it STAGING for simplicity.

Perform your first set a restores and restore to the staging share, you can create meaningful subdirectories one for each data source you are restoring.  

Now protect the STAGING share using DPM - protect using long term to tape only, Frequency yearly, and set retention policy for 20 years. 

Perform an ad-hoc backup (right-click the data source and create recovery point to tape)

When that completes, delete the sub-directories under the staging share and then repeat the process of restoring more data then backing up the same share.  When you are all done, you can remove the protection group, but maintain the tape backups so they will be available for restores.