Optimized vs. Unoptimized online jobs

Sometimes you find your DPM or MABS server running their online jobs and it takes forever to finish. It can go on for hours and sometimes days, the big question I get about this is why...

As we all know DPM and MABS can loose track of a protected data source and when that happens the protected data sources journal information is not passed on to DPM or MABS. This is an example of what can causes the replica to be inconsistent.

The same goes with the online jobs, the scenario differentiates a bit though. In the scenario of an online job being canceled it should (in the best of worlds 😊) not trigger an unoptimized online job. But if the online job was terminated unexpectedly due to a restart and loose track it must verify all the data that resides within the Recovery Services Vault in comparison to the DPM or MABS server.

This can take a very long time but the most important part here is to let the job finish or it will never be able to continue archiving your data further down the road. According to Microsoft there have been situations where the unoptimized online job has taken over 300 hours to finish…something to keep in mind.