Microsoft is offering the ultimate solution for performing Windows Vista backup and recovery actions as a free download. Well, in all fairness, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 is only a free evaluation software that will enable users to test drive the product. The offering is synonymous with the delivery of the first Release Candidate of the product. While the Redmond company is currently moving towards the release to manufacturing date, an evaluation edition was made available for download.

There are of course a few aspects that you need to take into consideration. First off, System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 will only work with Windows Vista Business, Enterprise and Ultimate. Additionally, the product is addressed at corporate environments and not at end users, and as such, it is designed to be tailor fitted on a variety of Windows operating systems and products. System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 will bring to the table a bundle of continuous data protection with traditional tape backup.

Jason Buffington, Senior Technical Product Manager Windows Storage Solutions Division, explained that the following products are supported by System Center Data Protection Manager 2007: SQL Server 2000, 2005 and even 2008-previews, Exchange Server 2003 and 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 & WSS 3.0, Virtualized Environments hosted on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 , Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 files and shares and Windows XP Professional (sp2) and Windows Vista Business edition or better.

System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 will provide seamless backup and recovery for the Windows Server System and for additional software built by the Redmond company. "Continuous Data Protection for Windows Application and File Servers protects Windows data by continuously capturing data changes with application-aware byte- and block-level agents, providing an easy-to-manage and robust disk/tape data protection solution, and one-click lossless application recovery," reads one of the key benefits of DPM as presented by Microsoft on the product's official webpage. System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 can be downloaded via this link.