Data Protection Manager - Troubleshooting MBR and VSC Problems

[Zoatibix]

Hello,

 

Having an issue with the above. The target servers are running a mixture of OSes - Server 2008 to Server 2012 R2.

 

The data itself is being backed up without issue.

 

However, the BMRs are always failing claiming that there is insufficient space (the drives are generally two-thirds full but according to MS they should only need around 1GB free)

 

I've tried manual VSS copies to a network share which completes successfully but I still get the error.

 

I have been reading that this error can be caused by a lack of space in the System Reserved partition...but the solution indicated is to use a third party disk repartitioning tool to increase the size of that partition. Something I'm not willing to try on a production server I can't get a good BMR/VSS back up on unless I have another choice.

 

Anybody come across this kind of thing before?

 

Thank you.

[IanT]

In case of BMR protection, DPM uses Windows Backup to directly write to the DPM replica (unlike in the case of System State backup, where Windows Backup dumps to a local volume and DPM then moves it to the replica).

 

This failure could mean that the DPM replica is out of space.

 

Do you see an alert on the DPM monitoring pane that says that the replica is out of space?

 

Alternatively, if you have auto-grow turned on, DPM will automatically grow the replica when required.

[rrrrr]

As IanT said, bmr uses windows backup to do a system backup locally, this is then transferred to dpm server. The size required depends on what is installed on the server.

Try moving the location of the local bmr backup to another drive. Edit the program files\microsoft data protection manager\dpm\datasources\psdatasourceconfig.xml and change the %systemdrive% variable to another drive

[ChrisH]

This is the one issue about DPM that drives me crazy, I have even had some servers in the past that will not do a BMR backup to the DPM server but will do a one off no problem and the issue was not a lack of space on the DPM server as it had 2.5 times the total required. I have resized the partition in the past and it has worked and it has also made the backup fail every time with weird errors you don't normally see.

 

As others have mentioned try changing the drive if possible or sometimes a previous one is corrupt and you need to delete the partial image off the local server. I do feel you pain though and it is the main reason I am considering an alternative backup solution.