Hi.

Thank you for your question.

Which version are you using?

“If an asset that does not match the include rule is added to a protection policy, the backup fails — even if that disk is explicitly excluded.”
This behavior is intentional in the current PPDM design, though I agree it is unintuitive compared to NetWorker.

PPDM applies include rules as a hard validation gate, not just a filter:

• If an asset is added to a policy,
• And none of its content matches the include scope,
• PPDM treats this as a misconfigured protection policy and fails the job.

In NetWorker, includes/excludes were evaluated during runtime traversal, and “nothing to back up” was usually a warning.
In PPDM, the philosophy is:

If you explicitly include something, it must evaluate to at least one protected object.

This applies even if:

• The disk is excluded
• The asset is added accidentally
• Another disk on the same host matches the include

workarounds

Split policies: One policy per include scope (messy, but reliable) Avoid include-only rules. Use exclude-only logic where possible. Validate assets before adding them to a policy (manual overhead)

“Renaming a folder by changing only the letter case breaks the backup.”

PPDM stores include/exclude paths exactly as defined and performs literal matching later. The comparison is effectively case‑sensitive at the protection engine level, even though NTFS is not.

Your other issue we do not currently have solutions for.

Let us know if there is anything else we can assist you with.

Thanks,

Josh

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Good day, thank you.

version 19.22

Currently, I select assets manually and either place them in the exclude protection policy or in backup with a file filter on directories. That works for now.  
Furthermore, the interface seems a bit chaotic and unclear to me. For example, in an asset, by clicking on asset C, it shows me all the assets even from other C servers.  
In the assets tree view, there is no option to click on the protection policy.  
Reports: what is also missing here is a proper report manager. For example, if we are using file filtering, we do not have a way to find out what was backed up. What is the way to check whether the file monitor backed up the correct data?  
And last but not least, how to handle SQL Server backup security. If it is not possible to use local service? Microsoft prefers Kerberos authentication. I assume that I cannot do this with a stored domain password. Local accounts are difficult to monitor. How to change passwords every 60 days? There may be dozens of servers, and using a single account is a security problem. I assume a gSMA account cannot be used.

In PPDM, assets are grouped by asset type and mount point, not strictly by host context in the UI. So clicking on “C:” does not mean the C: drive of a specific server; it means all assets that expose a C: mount across all hosts of that type.

Why SYSTEM cannot be used

PPDM’s SQL backup mechanism needs to:

• Authenticate to SQL Server
• Enumerate databases
• Perform VDI/VSS operations
• Potentially perform network operations (restore, copy)

NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM:

• Is local‑only
• Cannot authenticate remotely
• Cannot participate in Kerberos delegation
• Cannot be centrally managed

Therefore, SYSTEM is intentionally disallowed.

We do not support gSMA at this time. 

oka thank you. and any solution how change password in domain and ppdm  ? it is about 50sql servers and changing manualy not optimal....

and solution about inventory backup data , if use file filter ?

PPDM doesn’t autosync with AD. So update SQL passwords then using REST API for PPDM to update. You can enable detailed file logs which should show matches ir run a pre backup inventory. Get-ChildItem D:\Data -Recurse | Select FullName, Length

thank you and integrate with DPA ? if more custumized reports ? DPA can show files ?

These are the report tpes. Dell Data Protection Advisor 19.10 Report Reference Guide | Dell US