Using Windows Maintenance Tools

Published : September 27, 2005

In general, you can add the DPM server and protected file servers to your regular maintenance schedule and use the maintenance tools provided in Windows Server 2003. However, you need to be aware of some considerations that apply to a few specific tools when you use them with DPM. Those tools are listed in Table 4.1.

Table 4.1   Windows Maintenance Tools and DPM

Windows Tool	Considerations
Disk Cleanup: Use to remove temporary files, Internet cache files, and unnecessary program files.	Disk Cleanup is not available for replica volumes in the DPM Storage Pool.
Disk Defragmenter: Use to analyze volumes for the amount of fragmentation and to defragment volumes.	Before adding a volume to a protection group, check the volume for fragmentation, and, if necessary, defragment the volume, using Disk Defragmenter. When protection is applied to extremely fragmented volumes, boot times on the file servers might be slowed down and protection jobs might fail. It is recommended that you run Disk Cleanup before running Disk Defragmenter.
Chkdsk.exe: Use to check the file system and file system metadata for errors and to display a status report of its findings.	Before you run Chkdsk /f on a protected volume, verify that a consistency check of that volume is not being performed. Running chkdsk /f on a protected volume while consistency check is being performed on that volume may cause 100% CPU utilization. Run synchronization with consistency check after running Chkdsk.exe on the file server.