In order to carry out item level recovery of SharePoint 2010 using System Center Data Protection Manager 2010 (DPM) you may need to update the DPM catalog.

I was testing SharePoint 2010 recovery using DPM and got a shock when a site and page I setup for the testing weren’t listed as being available for recovery despite the fact I’d just created a recovery point.  It turns out they had been backed up, but the DPM catalog was out of date.  The steps below detail how to update the catalog.

Open the DPM Management Shell and enter the commands below, substituting X for you DPM server name

$PG = Get-ProtectionGroup -DPMServerName X

Press Enter, type $PG and press Enter again and you should see a table with two columns.

Type $DS = Get-Datasource $PG[X] and press Enter.  Substitute X with the number of the datasource in the list above.  In my case I want to update the catalog for the “SharePoint 2010” datasource, which is third in the list, so I enter [2] as the list is zero based.   Type $DS and press Enter.

The output above shows the details for the selected datasource.  I want to update the catalog for the Sharepoint Farm, so type the command below and press Enter.  $DS[0] is the value of the datasource item within the list.  This list is also zero based.

Start-CreateCatalog -Datasource $DS[0]

Allow a few minutes for the catalog to update and the items will be available for recovery.