Been working with online backup using System Center 2012 SP1 Data Protection Manager and Windows Azure Backup Agent for about a week now.
At best, this feels like working with a mystery black box. The transparency in the setup equals zero.
I have a protection group where all protected members shall have online recovery points every saturday.
- One Source got an Online recovery point last saturday.
- When I check scheduled jobs for Online recovery only that one source has a scheduled Online recovery point job.
- When I check the Recovery panel to see recovery points for that source my only option is Recover from: Disk, there is no way I can see if there is an online recovery point or not.
- I can create an online recovery point manually by selecting one of the other sources and this is successfully created, however it is not scheduled for a new job next saturday.
- In Management the Online Agent reports used space as 213.81 MB, however the web site on manage.windowsazure.com says my used storage is 4.43
- There is no way of inspecting the online recovery items. DPM Management panel just shows these 213 MB (which is wrong), Recovery shows only disk-based recovery points and the management website just tells
me that "You have some protected items associated with System Center - Data Protection Manager servers. We are currently not able to list protected items from these servers."
I am aware of Windows Azure Online Backup being a preview service, but this seems like an early early alpha version to me ? At least, DPM 2012 is not beta and should not behave in this "OK, will do ........<nothing happens>" matter.
I switched from Symantec to DPM 2012 due to the promising features but for the off-site backup I am very tempted to reinstall Symantec with all its quircks and misbehaviours and continue with that. At least Symantec tells me when it is misbehaving.
For production usage, is the only current option for DPM offsite backup to use a secondary DPM server and replicate the data?
(EDIT)UPDATE:
I removed online protection for all but one source. Result:
Every source in the protection group was now listed in a separate group with the message "Inactive online replica available". Right.... the online replica that never was performed ? By the way, the remaining source in the protection group is now
NOT scheduled for online recovery point....
I re-added all members. Remember last time I did this (as mentioned above) only 1 source was scheduled for online protection.
This time 42 of 46 sources is scheduled for online protection.
No errors, no information, no message at all on why the last 4 members was not included. The only way I could discover this was by counting the scheduled online recovery point jobs for this week and compare them with the number of sources in the protection
group.
Is enterprise-grade backup software meant to be this random ?
O