How to remove recovery points from Azure in an on-prem DPM 2019 installation

Question

Hello,

I have an installation of DPM 2019 that is configured to backup to an Azure recovery vault for our off-site backups. We have recently made a modification to our backup policies that allows us to reduce some of our storage footprint in Azure. For example, we were keeping several non-critical servers in the cloud for 5 years, and we have no modified our requirement to maintain a single year.

I am trying to remove specific recovery points for data-sources in the cloud, however the powershell command tools for the on-prem install do not appear to work for Cloud recovery points.

I get the following error when i run the Remove-DPMRecoveryPoint command

+ CategoryInfo          : NotSpecified: (:) [Remove-DPMRecoveryPoint], DlsException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : OnlineRecoveryPointsCannotBeDeleted,Microsoft.Internal.EnterpriseStorage.Dls.UI.Cmdlet.R

ecoveryCmdLets.RemoveRecoveryPoint
Remove-DPMRecoveryPoint : Online recovery points cannot be deleted. (ID: 33405)
At line:1 char:21

• foreach ($p in $rp){Remove-DPMRecoveryPoint -RecoveryPoint $p}

What is the correct command to do this? I do not want to remove every recovery point up there, which is the only option available to me in the DPM client. There must be some way that I can manage my storage footprint in Azure, surely?

Thanks,

Nick

Answer 1

Hi,

DPM is currently not supported in the Q&A forums, the supported products are listed over here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/products (more to be added later on).

You can ask the experts in the dedicated DPM forum over here:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/en-us/home?category=dpm

Recovery points in Azure can only be deleted from within the Azure Portal:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-delete-vault#delete-protected-items-in-the-cloud

(Please don't forget to accept helpful replies as answer)

Best regards,
Leon

Answer 2

Hello Nick,

Thanks for reaching out to us!

Am afraid to say, there is no way to remove an online recovery point manually, only if you change the retention to a lower value and wait for the garbage collection from service side to prune those data sources.

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Answer 3

I have to say - not being able to manage my spend in Azure is, frankly, appalling.

So I either have to delete everything, or continue to spend money on data that I no longer need?

I can target the recovery points on-prem and remove them individually. The DPM console treats the Azure storage as "local", in so far as i don't need to specifically target anything to recover from Azure.
I can get the list of recovery points in the cloud easily enough.
I can see the storage usage of the recovery points in Azure.

I can tell the DPM console to remove all the Cloud recovery points.
I can modify the retention period to selectively prune recovery points in Azure.

I can do everything that is required except remove selected points, but it appears as though all the required information is there.

Not allowing me to manage my spend by removing recovery points seems borderline criminal.