One highly requested feature is the ability to backup and restore sharepoint server , Microsoft have improved their sharepoint support in Data Protection Manager 2012 and added support for single item level recovery without having to restore the whole content database this will give a faster recovery.

The procedure for creating the backup havent changed from DPM2010 and i can highly recomend Mike Resseler’s 3 step blog post with setting up the 2010 part 

http://scug.be/blogs/scdpm/archive/2010/03/11/sharepoint-2010-protection-in-dpm-2010-part-1.aspx 

Current limitations as pr beta 2 (subject to change)

· Item-level recovery for items in Filestream databases will not be optimized.

· Tape recovery will not be optimized.

· DPM does not support item-level recovery for SharePoint sites using Variations. For more information about Variations, see Variations overview.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27216 beta2 and documentation download

On the sharepoint server after DPM Agent Installation , run ConfigureSharepoint.exe –EnableSharepointProtection , this will prompt you for a account that is Sharepoint Administrator

Create a protection group and add the Sharepoint install (here everything is located on one server) and let the first backup complete

DPM = Sucess

DPM will index the sharepoint content once a day , so there can be some delay in restore selection showing all content this can be foced with

get-ProtectionGroup dpm10.demo.local |get-datasource |where-object {$_.type –like "*sharepoint*"} | start-createcatalog , this will index the backup

If we then delete the document

then we can go into DPM and restore the item

When we select recovery

Since the original farm is running we will Recover without the using recovery farm

The new party trick is that DPM2012 will mount the content database from the replica on the Data Protection Manager server, this will save a significiant ammount of data transfer , but require that the replica being recovered from is located on disk (not sure if that will change as we go closer to RTM)

And we have our document back.

We can then on the Sharepoint Server see that DPM have attached a database to the local instance and then run the export / import commands on sharepoint to recovery the data, if we are fast enough we can see the database being mounted over the network to the DPM server.