Bare metal recovery – Element not found (0x80070490)

I’ve recently been testing our disaster recovery abilities particularly in restoring servers from the bare metal recovery feature of System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012. When restoring one of our servers (that is a virtual machine) I was getting the error message below just before the drive data starts to copy over. The system image restore failed. Error details: Element… Read more



Extending the AD Schema for end user recovery – System Centre Data Protection Manager

For a long time we’ve been using the built in features of Windows Server to allow users to recover their own work through the ‘Previous Versions’ tab in Windows Explorer (which works on the Volume Snapshot service) however the long term plan has been to get our DPM 2012 server to do the heavy lifting instead. When trying to extend… Read more



Force remove a server from the DPM 2012 management console

On occasion it maybe necessary to forcefully remove a server from the DPM management console. Maybe you have taken the server out of use without first uninstalling the DPM client through the console or have some kind of weird issue with the server you are protecting. Regardless if you want to force remove a server from the DPM management console it… Read more



Windows Server 2008 R2 bare metal backup – which drives?

If you are running System Centre Data Protection Manager (2010/2012) on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you may or may not know that when you are running a Bare Metal/System State Backup you are actually using the built in Windows Server Backup feature to keep your data safe. One thing that baffled me is why on some servers the backups… Read more



DPM 2012 can’t backup server with Sophos Installed

While setting up our new backup server (System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012) one of the issues we came across was with it failing the data synchronizations with a error message like this one- Type:     Synchronization Status:  Failed Description:        Changes for Volume C:\ on <servername><domainname> cannot be applied to \\?\Volume{4fac41a1-0f58-11dc-8993-806d6172696f}\ProgramData\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache\savxp\. (ID 112 Details: Cannot create a file when that file… Read more



Time for a new backup server

For the past few months we’ve had a donated storage server sitting in our storage room, with 8x1TB HDDs it was the perfect chance for us to supplement our daily tape backups with the speed of hard drives and move tape to monthly. The only issue was that the server came with a rather pants Intel Core2Duo processor that didn’t… Read more