Home > Storage > PowerStore > Databases and Data Analytics > Dell PowerStore: Microsoft SQL Server Best Practices > Snapshots and recoveries
To automate and simplify protecting data, PowerStore uses protection policies. These protection policies help to protect data, set retention policies, and help guarantee recovery point objectives for an organization. Protection policies are a set of snapshot and replication rules that are applied to a volume, volume group for block storage. Protection policies for file include snapshots at the file system level and replication at the NAS server level.
In addition, protection policies can be applied to volume groups. By applying a protection policy to a volume group, it allows snapshots, replication, and recovery of the entire group. This allows the protection of a database that spans multiple volumes. To ensure successful recovery of SQL Server databases, ensure all database files, including the transaction log file, are in the same volume group and the write-order consistency option is enabled on the volume group.
Secure snapshots are also available on a protection policy to prevent deletion of snapshots while the retention period is in effect. Snapshots that are taken with secure snapshots enabled on the protection policy are marked as secure and will not be deleted before the retention expiration time. Use secure snapshots to prevent data loss from malicious or unintentional deletion.