matthewjfazio

I believe someone on the TechNet forums has just answered my question. If anyone is in the same boat, I hope this will help you out! http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/4142b4a0-3737-46e9-a608-24f3f52350fe/is-there-a-real-method-to-create-the-initial-data-replica-to-a-usb-drive-for-dpm-2012

Saars, Thanks, but this is just a simple rewording of the link I included in my original post. Your link and the link above talk about moving data off a DPM server to another location. I'm looking to create an initial data set from the client onto a USB drive and then relocate/import it to the DPM server. I can't copy the data over the network, there is too little bandwidth-- I need to use a USB drive.

I've got several remote office locations with file servers containing a good amount of data, but they have very poor (3Mbps) WAN connections. I've been tasked to set up DPM to back up these locations. Due to the size of the data and the lack of bandwidth, I'm going to need to get the techs out there to copy the data portions of the servers onto USB drives and send them to me so I can import them into the DPM storage here. But I’m having some problems finding the document that instructs a tech how to copy the initial data replica to a USB drive, then docs on how I can import this data. I have found this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj642916.aspx but it talks about server-to-server copying, which previously mentioned is not something we can not do due to bandwidth issues. We need to copy to USB drive, then ship the drive to me for import into DPM. There’s some mention of doing this to tape (then importing to DPM) as well, but I can’t find more details either… it’s sort of weird, like the documentation or help files on TechNet are incomplete. Like take a look at this link http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh757818.aspx -- it’s pretty useless! Has anyone done this yet? Can anyone please point me in the right direction?