This recipe will cover the information that you need to understand how DPM manages tapes.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 is a focused restore product. This reflects from a tape management perspective and how DPM writes protected data to tapes.

The DPM server could write data directly to the tape by using an incremental technology, but this is not a recommended approach as the vision of DPM is to use the backup-to-disk technology as its primary choice.

DPM will write a full backup to the tape and never create long incremental tape chains that could be seen as a risk in the restore process. DPMs are, of course, able to span and divide the protected data sources between tapes, but this is not the same technique as incremental tape backup.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 R2 will present accurate information regarding your tape status. Information regarding when your tape is offsite ready, which means that you can remove it from the tape...