Jeff Wouters's Blog

One of my customers uses System Center Data Protection Manager to backup their environment and are currently doing a manual inventory of their backup tapes. Now, it is possible to get this information through the GUI with the following action:

• Open the DPM Administrator Console
• Click Protection.
• Click a protection group.
• Click View tape list.

When yoú have multiple protection groups, this may take a lot of manual labor.
There is an easier way… by using PowerShell.

With the following command you’ll get a list of all tapes that are available in DPM:

Get-ProtectionGroup –DPMServer DPM001 | get-tape | select -ExpandProperty label | sort | out-file E:\Temp\DPMTapeLabelList.txt

But normally a tape has a barcode sticker on it, not the label So, for getting all barcodes:

Get-ProtectionGroup –DPMServer DPM001 | get-tape | select barcode | sort | out-file E:\Temp\DPMTapeBarcodeList.txt

And now you can check which backup tapes are actually there and which are missing…