Currently the documents for DPM 2019 state:

> DPM does not support deduplication on ReFS disk used for MBS backups.

It would be preferable that this is supported as it will provide better performance (not needing to create artificial fragmentation due to 1TB disks, wasted deduplication time due to empty space in a vhdx, no additional abstraction layer or multiple OSes running). Further, ReFS supports 4TB files for deduplication and would allow the deduplication of datasources larger than 1TB.

Currently I've been running this on a few servers and as far as I can tell there aren't any incompatibilities as backups, restores, and tape backups (to a VTL) seem to be working without issues and deduplication has been performing far better than using the 1TB VHDx method.

In MABS, you can setup an SMTP server for sending emails. The issue is that there is a requirement that the username you supply in the SMTP username field must be a domain user. I have no idea why this is required, but it makes using a 3rd party service such as SendGrid as your SMTP server much harder. In Sendgrid, I setup an API Key which then says I must supply the username as "apikey" and the password is the actual apikey.

Obviously, the user "apikey" does not exist in the domain, so when MABS checks this, it fails.

I don't see why there is a check to see if the user exists in the domain when setting up an SMTP server.

Hi,

I've recently had to rebuild our primary DPM server and chose to go to 1801 > 1807 to future proof a bit! Once the production was up and running I thought it was worth backing that up to another DPM server, so I created one in Hyper-V & got to the installation phase when I had the dreaded "I couldn't find the Hyper-V tools installed" error. However, this one was different - it was looking for a registry key at HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Setup\HyperVPowerShell. Just out of curiosity I manually created this path in the registry & the installer sailed through. Just thought you might want to know, as this failure to identify Hyper-V & tools is a bit of a sticking point - the production instance wouldn't install until I let the DPM installer add the features, it didn't recognise them if I used PowerShell to add them manually.

Many thanks,
Rhidian

When you back up a large number of computers, and apply the same policy for everyone (2000 or 3000 computers), it would be very interesting to allow users to exclude certain subfolders.

In our case, we want to save the My Pictures folder, but a large number of users store private data (example: holiday photos), we do not want to find this data on our DPM servers, in this kind of case we would like to save the My Pictures folder but let the user exclude his private subfolders.

It would be a good compromise between security and freedom offered to users.

Take this basic script as an example, call it AzureSizeTest.PS1 and run it on your DPM server that has an Azure backup:

$Log = "$env:windir\temp\test.log"
Get-DPMCloudSubscription | Out-File $Log

It will give you the space used in your subscription like this:
SubscriptionName : Azure Backup
UsedSpace : 2265763566598
TotalSpace : 2265763566598
StorageQueriedTime : 18/01/2018 13:15:42
RegistrationStatus : AgentInstalledAndRegistered

The UsedSpace will match the figure in the Management >> Online section in DPM.

If you then run that script as a scheduled task the output is:

SubscriptionName : Azure Backup
UsedSpace : 0
TotalSpace : 322122547200
StorageQueriedTime : 18/01/2018 13:23:42
RegistrationStatus : AgentInstalledAndUnknown

No used space because the Agent is in an unknown state.
I can confirm that both run as the same domain account and with administrative rights.

We would like to be able to have good summary information around backup where we don't have an Azure only solution. In a case where we are seeing a lot of growth around IaaS workloads that are not in Azure but are Windows server based where we use a lot of System Center for Monitoring, Management and Backup. It would be great to consolidate backup information from multiple customers where we manage their environment and need to meet in this case backup SLA's using DPM either D2D2VTL or D2D2Azure. Having a backup summary would allow at a glance to show our current failed backup and SLA's state in a central location for all of our managed customers.