Dear Gents;

We are in the process of migrating one of our servers .

I want to backup everything in the server (Local Volumes, System state) to a tape, then stop protection for this server and uninstall the dpm agent from the server.

However, uninstalling the agent requires all protection of the member to be expired completely (in this case, the tape too) .

We want to keep the backup on the tape. So if we expired it, and uninstalled the agent, will we be able to recover later from this tape?

in other words, whats the correct way to keep a backup for a retired server on a tape using DPM?

Our goal is to take a final backup for archival reasons .

DPM Server version: MSDPM 2010 RTM on Windows 2008R2

Protected Server: Win2003SP1

Protected Data: System Drive (C:\ and System State)  .

Hi,

You just need to stop protection for all the datasources of that machine - and select the option retain the data.  That will place the datasources in an inactive protection group, and the machine will be moved to unprotected computer with protection agents.  At this point, you can uninstall the agent on that machine.    The Disk based recovery points for the data sources in the inactive protection group will be available for recovery until you manually delete the inactive protection for them. Tape based backups in inactive protection expire based on original expiry date. 

OK in this case, what will happen if I off-site the tape which has not been marked as "ready for offsite" yet? will the RP's on tape be expired if the retention range passes as well?

Hi,

Being marked offsite ready has no bearing on expiry date of the datasets written to tape.  If you don't want the tapes to expire, then before removing the machine from protection, add another long term tape goal like yearly and maintain for 99 years.  Then you can run a DPM Power shell script in the below post to select a recovery goal (the one for yearly) to make a current backup for.  This will backup all datasources in the PG, so if you only want that one server, place it in it's own PG before running the script.

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/dpmtapebackuprecovery/thread/4d9e8f47-33b6-4f57-82fa-6d25f6c43d80