Q. Can I remove a file from System Center DPM backups?
A. This question arose after a user found a virus on their machine, which was part of the DPM backup of their desktop. The requirement was to remove the file from all recovery points (point-in-time views of the protected data) on Data Protection Manager (DPM).
Unfortunately this is not possible with DPM, because DPM leverages Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) shadow copies, and there is no way to remove a file from a shadow copy. They are essentially read-only.
The best option here is to leverage the anti-malware client on the desktop: this ensures that if a virus-infected file is restored, it's quarantined and cleaned accordingly.
If you really have a hard requirement to remove the file with the virus from DPM, your options are to:
- Remove the protection of the machine and select the option to remove the workloads data from DPM storage by removing the replica
- Re-add the protection of the machine which will repopulate DPM with only the current data
