Disaster Recovery of a DPM server made easy

Using a primary and a secondary DPM server is a great feature for a disaster recovery scenario. The advance of using this approach is that you will be safer if the primary DPM server will fail in somehow, switching the agents so they communicate with the secondary DPM server directly is made easy with a PowerShell script or a CMDLET.

Some companies doesn’t got the economy to have a primary and a secondary DPM server. So how can we design a disaster and recovery function for companies that runs only one DPM server? This is made easy with the executable DpmBackup.exe.

This batchfile will dump the local DPM database (DPMDB) to the location:
%systemdrive%\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\Database Backups.

After running the batchfile you will see a file named DPMDB.BAK. This file contains all the important information regarding DPM and its agents, disks etc.

A good idea is to run a schedule task that dumps this DPMDB and copy it to another physical location or hardware. An example of a BAT-file could look like this:

cd "c:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin"
dpmbackup.exe –db

net use x: \\SERVERNAME\SHARENAME
cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\Database Backups"
xcopy dpmdb.bak X: /Y