DPM Management - Part 1

                                         Skip blah and Proceed at your own risk:

                                                   Backup management has been something I've done all my career, literally every single weekday to say the least - That's not an achievement someone would be proud of anyway. My routine is crawling amidst a variety of Enterprise backup solutions like the very-basic Windows Server Backup, Veeam, Backup Exec(Symantec and Veritas), Shadow Protect, and the star of the season - The Data Protection Manager and its newest sibling MABS. These Microsoft products unfortunately are put to use mainly because they're kind of free, and reading between the lines - we get to know why. Who'd any day spend a dime on a supposedly-enterprise solution that has near-zero documentation from the vendor or how-tos or even a good forum for help. Almost every technet article on issues relating to MABS or DPM doesnt get a clear answer; Now thats not very Microsoft.

An interesting take:

The tool apparently has a backup management which is more complex than Symantec's DLM, and is buried deep in the dark web. I take it as a puzzle that Microsoft has offered to Backup Admins -  you learn something after you happen to fix an issue. This newly found wisdom is mostly short-lived until the same issue recurs; Rewriting mine happened every time I had an issue with this backup solution(apparently not a real solution though).

Agenda:

The storage the backup takes up is another rabbit-hole; It rarely frees up space from older backups, and there isn't an option in the GUI to remove older snapshots(herein called Recovery points); It persistently misses a whole group of recovery points, taking up more space than you could extrapolate and crashes the backups in whole. This was a perennial issue for the admins, and was literally eating the brains inside out.

Shelling:

PowerShell is one of the most powerful tools when you're playing with a Microsoft farm. Again its only PS that could save days of no-so-worthy layman job.
The powershell commands were helping the admins, but not up-to the level we'd expect it to.
A string of cmdlets in a chain was the only viable solution, the building blocks of which were readily available; All I need is a logic and a non-self-destructing script.

The script metamorphosed quite a lot, largely from inputs/requirements from colleagues - Pretty cool-ish to be frank.
At the point of writing this, the script has already graduated by 1 major version and 4 minor versions.

TaDa:

All you need is here: MABS_RPdel.ps1
And the script is pretty much self-explanatory, I guess.

P.S. Noobs may need to patiently wait for a good how-to blog post available here: :)