Microsoft’s Data Protection Manager (DPM) is a dream when it works, but I spend way too much time wrestling with it to make it work and the reports it issues to track jobs are worthless.  The whole experience reminds of Arcserve circa 1997: poorly made technology trying to do too much. 

It seems as if the software doesn’t miss a chance get a protection status of ‘Recovery point creation failed’ or ‘Replica is inconsistent’.  Why did it ‘fail’?  Why is it inconsistent?  Disk space seems to have something to do with it most of the time, but other times it just seems as if the software just got grumpy.  One of our servers is in an even worse state since any Windows Server 2008 backup (either the built-in or DPM) ends with a not entirely unknown  0x0000007E blue screen stop error. 

Is DPM going to be like Arcserve where it took CA six years to write a product that wouldn’t crash every time I went to back up Exchange?  I hope not.