This is one of the most frustrating issues to come across as DPM will happily tell you it’s working perfectly fine unless you notice your most recent backup time doesn’t quite look right, especially as most of the time you’re going to spot this when you need to do a restore. But all is not lost, let’s get on to fixing it.

Troubleshooting Steps

Check Services

First thing to check is to ensure that the relevant services are running on the SQL server, the most important being the SQL Server Agent. If you spot any issues here then fix them and see if the jobs start to work.

SQL Jobs & Service Accounts

Failing that, open the relevant SQL database using SQL Server Management Studio and navigate to ‘SQL Server Agent’ then Jobs. Attempt to run the jobs manually by right-clicking the name then ‘Start Job at Step’. Assuming this displays an error similar to the image below the next place we’ll check is whether the service accounts for SQL and what DPM thinks they should be are aligned.

On the SQL server check the user accounts that the ‘SQL Server’ & ‘SQL Server Agent’ services are using (ideally they should be the same), take note of what it is. Then on the DPM server navigate to ‘ HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Setup ‘ using RegEdit and ensure that the ‘SqlAgentAccountName’ and ‘SchedulerJobOwnerName’ show the same values as the user you took note of.

Once the details are aligned, go to the DPM server and right-click the affected protection group then select ‘Modify’. Navigate through the wizard without changing anything. This will update the scheduled jobs to use the new details.

Support Files

Finally, if you’re still encountering issues, ensure that you’ve installed the DPM support files. They are required as they contain the relevant files to run scheduled SQL tasks among other things.

To check this go to SQL Server Management Studio again and right-click one of the active jobs, then select ‘Properties’. Navigate to the ‘Steps’ pane then select ‘Edit’. Copy the command out and try to navigate to the directory, you should find this exact path which should contain ‘TriggerJob.exe’.

If you don’t find the directory or the file then mount your DPM iso and reinstall/install the ‘DPM Remote SQL Prep’ files and then see if scheduled tasks start to run.

---

At this point you should hopefully have fully functioning scheduled tasks as I did, failing that you’ll at least be a step forward hopefully.