This post will cover the disaster recovery of Data Protection Manager Server , there are a few ground rules that needs to be followed.

NEVER ever loose your tapes (duh)

ALWAYS keep a backup of the configuration database

ALWAYS keep a domain controller alive , and keep a backup of a domain controller with Windows Backup so it can be restored if everything else is gone.

If we loose our data protection manager server due to hardware issues flood earthquake or fonzie attack we need always to keep our data on tape a copy on a different Data Protection Manager with the DPM to DPM backup feature.

In this senario we will kill the Data Protection Manager server and recover data from tape only, i use the exellent filesteamer from http://www.cristalink.com awesome for testing and for long term recovery to disk.

DPM uninstalled and all data deleted, remember if you need to rebuild the operating system you need to call the server the same as before the rebuild.

We then need to start the installation of Data Protection Manager

This setup used the local sql database so for testing we will create a new sql instance for the Data Protection Manager Server

And we will use the default file paths for install

After install we dont have any recovery points as all our data is located on tape and we have lost our configuration database

Go to Management and Libaries

Select Rescan for Data Protection Manager to scan for tape devices

Yes please.

When the tape libary is connected after rescan we can see the tapes but not whats on them

We then need to perform a detailed inventory

After the detailed inventory the tapes now shows as inported with label the tapes was created with

If you know what tape the data protection manager configuration database is on in the newest version run the “Recatalog imported media”

Yes please , this will take time

But very fast on a test setup with a virtual tape libary

We can then see the Data Protection Manger server and recovery points for the configuration database

Data Protection Manager cant restores its own database directly so it needs to be restored to a network location

And we can only restore locally as we have no agents connected to the Data Protection Manager server (but we need to db locally)

Here we will just restore the Data Protection Manager configuration database

And Data Protection Managers trade mark “Sucessful” as usual

There are differnt ways to connect the database i prefeer just to stop all Data Protection Manager services

Detatch the database from our clean install

Copy the database files from the restore to C:\restore (example)

Attach the database files

And reboot the data protection manager server

After reboot we can now see that Data Protection Manager knows the tapes

And the agents is connected again and we can restore from mutiple sources.

There is some housekeeping that needs to be run after this but this will get you up and running and start restoring data