Symptoms

• Tapes will be listed as “Suspect”
• DPM will not be able to write to these tapes

Troubleshooting

One of the first indication that this was not a legitimate error was that i was seeing this on 7 brand new tapes

Another giveaway was that they were labeled this way after a Fast Inventory, which means that they have never entered the drive to be read or written on

Resolution 1

Change the label on the tape.

For me, everything in the 50 range was being marked as suspect. e.g. 450-459, 550-559.

This is not a very good fix but will allow the tapes to be written on should you be hesitant to try anything else

Resolution 2

Open the DPM Shell and enter the following

osql -E -S localhost\MSDPM2012 -d DPMDB -Q “UPDATE tbl_MM_ArchiveMedia SET IsSuspect = 0”

This command will modify the SQL table and change all tapes to non-suspect

WARNING: if you have any tapes that are legitimately suspect this will also change them so use with caution

Resolution 3

This method will allow you to individually mark tapes as not suspect, but can be quite time consuming

Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

Navigate to Server Instance > Databases > DPMDB > Tables

Right click on dbo.tbl_MM_ArchiveMedia and click “Edit Top 200 Rows”. should you have more than 200 tapes you can easily expand the amount of rows in the right pane under “Top Specification”, change it to No

To Identify which tape is which, run a query on the database (DPMDB) and match MediaID to the edit tab

select [BarcodeValue], [MediaID]
FROM [DPMDB].[dbo].[tbl_MM_Media]

Once the correct row is identified change the column marked “IsSuspect” to 0

Note: i am working on a PowerShell script that will make this process easier, but time has been tight and this will be a good starting point for most people

Symptoms

• Job displays “Attempting to cancel for an extended period of time”

Troubleshooting

The jobs that i experienced this issue with refused to budge, even after a full system restart. However, Time Elapsed continues counting up on some of them

Resolution

1. Ensure that there are no other jobs currently running
2. Open SQL Management Studio and connect to your DPM SQL instance
3. Right click on the instance and click “New Query”
4. Copy and paste the following query into the Window——————————————————————————-
   USE DPMDBBEGIN TRANUPDATE tbl_PRM_LogicalREplica

   SET Validity = 1

   WHERE OwnerTaskIdLock IS NOT NULL AND

   Validity <> 5 AND

   Validity <> 6

   UPDATE tbl_PRM_LogicalREplica

   SET OwnerTaskIdLock = null,

   Status=8

   if (select COUNT(name) from tbl_AM_Agent where Name like ‘DPM RA v2%’) > 0

   begin

   exec sp_executesql N’UPDATE tbl_RM_ShadowCopy

   SET ArchivetaskId = NULL,

   RecoveryJobId = NULL’

   end

   UPDATE tbl_ARM_Datasource

   SET Status = 0,

   OwnerLockId = NULL

   DELETE tbl_RM_DatasourceServerlock

   DELETE tbl_RM_ShadowCopyLocks

   UPDATE tbl_TE_TaskTrail

   SET ExecutionState = 3,

   LastStateName = ‘Failure’,

   StoppedDateTime = GetUtcDate()

   WHERE ExecutionState NOT IN (2,3)

   UPDATE tbl_JM_JobTrail

   SET JobState= ‘Failed’,

   EndDateTime = GetUtcDate()

   WHERE jobstate= ‘Execute’ OR jobstate= ‘Retire’

   UPDATE tbl_MM_Global_Media

   SET ReservationLevel = 0,

   ReservationOwnerMMId = null

   UPDATE tbl_MM_Global_Drive

   SET ReservationLevel = 0,

   ReservationOwnerMMId = null

   UPDATE tbl_MM_Global_IEPortResource

   SET ReservationLevel = 0,

   ReservationOwnerMMId = null

   COMMIT TRAN
   ——————————————————————————-

5. Execute Query
6. Open DPM console
7. Find all volumes that were affected (they will most likely say “Recovery Point Creation Failed”)
8. Right click on volume and select “Create Recovery Point”
9. Select “Create a recovery point by using express full backup”

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