Am I Screwed

[staboogie]

I was doing only brick level backups every night. My exchange server died. Can I just recreate a duplicate server with the mailboxes and restore the data to these mailboxes or is all hope lost?

 

[mohamdr]

Hi
restore should work without any problem if you recreate a duplicate server,it must me exactly same.

regards,
mohamdr

 

[staboogie]

Thank you very much for your quick response. Do you belive that I have to recreate all the mailboxes also or can I just pull them from the backup?

 

[mohamdr]

Hi
Unfortunately you need to create all mailboxes since if you restore the brick level backup items the mailbox must
be there before you start restore ,CA is going to intorduce this feature in next relases which is going create the mailbox automatcally if it is not there before starting restore.

1-Which version of exchange you are using?
2-do you have backup of system state?

regards,
mohamdr

 

[staboogie]

i actually found a duplicate server that was here. it used to be the production email server running the same way, last admin left it as a backup. this one has all the mailboxes, i dont have the system state backed up, i am hoping that the mailboxes can just be loaded on top of the existing ones (on the backup exchange server) also, my heart almost stopped when i tried to verify the backup tapes on another backup machine and they came up unreadable media. this machine is not doing exchange backup, just a regular backup with a different tape drive. should i be concerned about that?

 

[Cyklops]

You shouldn't. Check the ARCserve versions on both original and spare backup server, merge the tape into the database and start restoring.

Good luck

 

[staboogie]

thanks for your help. one last question, how do you merge the tape into the database?

 

[mohamdr]

Hi
1-palce the tape in drive
2-from menu go to Manager-->Utilites-->merge
3-If you know the session you want to merge you can specify it otherwise you need to merge the whole tape and this will take longer time.
4-start the merge job.

regards,
mohamdr

 

[staboogie]

thank you, i have a full backup from monday and incremental from the rest of the week, do i need to merge these 2 tapes to get back the data from friday?

 

[mohamdr]

Hi
No no need to merge the tapes last week info suppose to be still exist on Arcserve database unless the pruning period has been changed to less than one week by default it is 30 days, you can cehck it from server admin and select database tab.

If you are able to see the session info in restore screen no need merge the tapes

regards,
mohamdr