Recently, one of the data sources backed up by our DPM server was becoming inconsistent and preventing backups from occurring. No matter how many times we ran a consistency check, the source remained inconsistent.

The DPM console was next to useless in assisting to determine the fault that was causing the source to be inconsistent. After a few days the inconsistency warning changed and gave a little further information:

“The replica of Volume E:\ on FILESERVER.COMPANY.LOCAL is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check. You can recover data from existing recovery points, but new recovery points cannot be created until the replica is consistent.

For SharePoint farm, recovery points will continue getting created with the databases that are consistent. To backup inconsistent databases, run a consistency check on the farm. (ID 3106)

RECOMMENDED ACTION:

Review the failure errors for individual files from the log file \\?\Volume{ebad65e7-fcf2-13e4-962d-001ec9ee5638}\e3866ced-d582-263a-a326-a6aabdc8f361\FailedFilesLog.txt and take appropriate action. If some files fail consistently, you can exclude the folders containing these files by modifying the protection group or moving the files to another location.”

The first step in finding out what is in the logfile is mounting the volume:

mountvol x:\\?\Volume{ebad65e7-fcf2-13e4-962d-001ec9ee5638}

This gave me access to the volume via Windows Explorer using the x: drive (the drive letter is irrelevant, just use one that is spare). Opening the x: drive there is a folder, e3866ced-d582-263a-a326-a6aabdc8f361, within which should be the logfile. However, when attempting to open the folder, I received an “Access Denied” message.

The only way to get around that was to take ownership of the folder and apply permission that would allow me to traverse the folder to access the logfile. Once that was done, I could open the folder and see the logfile. Unfortunately, that was also “Access Denied”! Same process again, take ownership, apply permissions…

When I was able to access the logfile, it informed me that a large number of files were inaccessible to the DPM server. These were excluded from the Protection Group.

To prevent any issues with DPM accessing the volume again, I removed the permissions I had set on both the logfile and the folder and reassigned ownership to the SYSTEM account.

The Consistency Check was then restarted and completed successfully, allowing restoration point to be created again.