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The Data Manager Appliance supports centralized protection for NAS assets, where all the stages of the protection policy are managed by the Data Manager Appliance.
Note: The Data Manager Appliance uses these credentials at the policy level for all shares unless otherwise specified at the asset level. The credentials provide snapshot creation and export permissions on the appliance and read/write access to the NAS shares.
If credentials are set at the protection policy level, all shares should use the same credentials for access. Otherwise, if individual asset credentials are set at the asset level, multiple assets use their respective credentials.
You can apply exclusion filters to the protection policy when creating or editing a protection policy. Exclusion filters enable you to exclude certain files and folders from protection, based on the filter's conditions (conditions for exclusion). Adding exclusion filters to a protection policy can increase the overall backup time because file-based backups traverse through the entire directory structure to back up all the files in each directory of NAS.
See PowerProtect Data Manager Appliance Administrator Guide for DM5500 for more detailed steps about creating a protection policy for NAS protection.