How to temporarily disable a DPM 2012 scheduled backup?

Question

I need to temporarily disable some scheduled backups of Hyper-V server images. The only option I see is "Stop protection of member" which seems to delete the backup job. How do you disable a backup job without deleting it?

Running System Center 2012 DPM SP1

Answer 1

You can safely stop protection of member, specifying Retain data on the wizard. This will effectively stop the schedule but keep the existing data. When you want to re-schedule backups, you must re-create the protection group, so be sure to note down the configuration (frequency, type, ...) before stopping protection. DPM will automatically realize that there exists previous backup data for the datasource and use this as a starting point.
Note that backups will not be available while the protection group does not exist, as in fact you are not pausing the backups but stopping + starting.
It is easier to understand if you think in DPM as a replication software more than a backup system.

Answer 2

This is an old question, but I thought I'd add my two cents. I do not recommend the above solution except as a one-time special case. I have 47 Exchange CCR clusters backed up by an equal number of DPM servers, and I have to "pause" backups every time I do a failover or I run the risk of a failed database dismount during the failover. Removing the protection groups every time I needed to perform maintenance on a client machine would be a nightmare.

I recommend that you simply disable the DPMRA service on the client machine, and then stop it. The DPM server can continue running in this state. Backups will fail obviously, but as soon as you re-enable the service you can resume backups with no issue. Disabling/enabling the service is easily scripted in powershell, which is also a plus:

Disable:

Set-Service dpmra -StartupType Disabled
net stop dpmra

Enable:

Set-Service dpmra -StartupType Manual

Sometimes uninstalling the protection group is your only option, but I would not recommend using that as your go-to method for planned maintenance.