How to Prepare an Offsite replica with DPM 2010

Sometimes the need will arise to backup your DPM replicas to removable storage for whatever reason.  It might be so that you can recover your DPM server in case of a disaster or you might even want to use the replicas to seed another DPM server in a DPM 2 DPM 4 DR scenario.  Here is an extremely simple and effective way to accomplish that:

1. On your DPM Server open an Admin Command Prompt
2. Navigate to the DPM bin folder (usually C:\
   Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\bin\)
3. Execute dpmbackup -db
4. Execute dpmbackup -replicas
5. I prefer using robocopy to copy the data to USB (or any alternate) Storage like so: robocopy C:\Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy\ %destination% /e /b

What the above does is creates snapshots of the replica volumes and then mounts those read-only snapshots under the \Program Files\Microsoft DPM\DPM\Volumes\ShadowCopy folder.  It is therefore a point in time replica which you can copy wherever you wish, be it disk or tape.  You can, of course, also use your favorite backup software to backup your replicas, just be sure to configure it to traverse mount points.