Symptoms

• Protection group member displays “Replica is Inconsistent”

Troubleshooting

There is a large number of reasons you could be seeing this error, the two main areas to focus on are making sure that the backup feature is installed and the event viewer logs on the target server

Resolution 1

1. Right click on the member and click “Perform consistency check…”

Resolution 2 (Server 2012 and 2008 R2)

1. Connect to target server
2. Open PowerShell window
3. Type “import-module servermanager”
4. Type “get-windowsfeature”. this will display a list of the Windows Services and Features that are currently installed
5. Locate the Windows Server Backup line and ensure that it is ticked, if not continue with this resolution
6. (Server 2012) Type “add-windowsfeature windows-server-backup”
7. (Server 2008 R2) Type “add-windowsfeature backup”
8. Right click on the member in the DPM console and click “Perform consistency check…”

Resolution 3 (Server 2008)

1. Open Server Manager
2. Click Add Features
3. Locate Windows Server Backup Features and expand
4. Select Windows Server Backup and click next, then finish the wizard
5. Right click on the member in the DPM console and click “Perform consistency check…”

Resolution 4 (Server 2003)

1. Install the Server 2003 VSS update http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940349
2. Right click on the member in the DPM console and click “Perform consistency check…”

Resolution 4

1. Verify that the volume that you are attempting to backup has enough HDD space, general rule is to have the volume (when OS volume) at 50% capacity but this can vary depending on your individual requirements

Resolution 5

1.  Open CMD as administrator
2. Type “wbadmin -destination <dest>” where <dest> is the location that you wish to backup everything to, e.g. D:\Backup (WARNING: this will use up a large amount of space)
3. Right click on the member in the DPM console and click “Perform consistency check…”

At our site our file server is quite large and is required to be backed up offsite via DPM replication

As the volume is around 4TB and we have a 10mb/s link this would have taken a large amount of time

The solution is to copy the volume to removable media and then relocate it to the secondary DPM server

Instructions

1. Configure the protection on the secondary site as you would normally but select “manual” when asked if you want to start the synchronization now
2. On the primary DPM server locate the volume you wish to have replicated and at the bottom of the screen click “Replica Path”. you cant expand the window but if you double click on the end of the column (instead of clicking and dragging) you can expand the column to its full size

3. Open the command prompt and type “mountvol” and locate the replica path, then mark and copy the line above it

4. Type “mountvol” followed by an unused drive letter and the paste the previous contents (e.g. mountvol T:\ \\?\Volume{4bae1ccb-e2eb-11e2-93ee-00155d032025}\)

5. Open your newly mounted volume and see if you are able to access all folders, if need to change the owner, I suggest to the local administrator
6. Copy contents of mounted volume to your removable media
7. Relocate removable media to secondary site
8. Repeat steps 1-5 on secondary DPM server
9. Paste contents of removable media into mounted volume
10. Run a consistency check on the server

This week i decided to tackle and issue with our tape library that has been there for several months now and Dell was unable to give me any feedback as to what might be causing it

Up until this point i was very reluctant to touch anything as the library is not completely reliable (despite this being our second unit)

So after a fair amount of poking around the web gui i was able to work out what was showing this annoying warning

In our library i have two cleaning tapes, but had the number of active slots set to 23.

After changing this number the number to 21 the error went away and the library status is now green

I did notice that this caused DPM to be unable to see the cleaning tapes and thus you cant initiate a drive clean from within the DPM console. This is an inconvenience but not a large issue because i have left the “Auto Clean Enabled” box ticked which should keep the drive clean