Removing orphaned/old Agents from DPM Management View

Just a quick tip - we're preparing our upgrades to DPM 2012 and have decided it's about time we cleaned up some bits and pieces in DPM.

One of the "to clear up" items was to remove old no-longer-in-use Protected Computers from the Agents List in Management - for various reasons we'd ended up with some machines who still show up despite being long since removed and thrown away.

There's no way to do this from the main UI, but with a quick bit of DPM powershell you can nuke those old systems...

Run this script:

Remove-ProductionServer.ps1 -DPMServerName DPMSERVERNAMEHERE -PSName SERVERNAMEHERE

NOTE: You'll generally need to do "SERVERNAME.fullyqualified.com" if it is a domain joined server.

Once you've closed/reopened the UI you'll have a much tidier list :-)

Microsoft Data Protection Manager

So we've reached the point after many years where we want to reduce our use of Backup Exec. Mainly because it is stupidly expensive and just not reliable enough.

So we figured we'd give Microsoft Data Protection Manager a go. Full of optimism, we began the install. It failed at the first hurdle.

You see the software was in a folder "C:\!Software\DPMServer2010"

Except the installer decided that is actually "C:\Software\DPMServer2010"

So although ! is a perfectly valid File System Character, the DPM Installer failed.

Folder renamed and it worked.

It isn't a good start... this is the sort of stupidity Backup Exec had!