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Backing up Exchange

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rrkano

IS-IT--Management
Jul 26, 2004
42
US
My full backup of the Exchange Server over the weekend is exceeding 48 hours. I'm using Brightstor 9.1 and a Compaq TL-891 DLT Tape Library. The rest of the servers in the backup go quite well. But the exchange server takes forever. I'm backing up both the Information Store and the Brick level. Is that redundant? Perhaps that's way it's taking so long? Can some one shed some light on this for me? Also, what's the difference between backing up the Information Store and the Brick Level. Thanks
 
Within the job are you going through the agent? Do you have an Exchange agent installed? Or are you backing up this server through NETWORK?

Try to do your jobs through the agent? Also Run the Brick as a seperate job that can append to your other backups.

Greg
 
The Information Store backup is needed if you loose your entire Exchange server. This backup is critical for this purpose.

The brick level backup is only used if you need to restore individual mailboxes. You can restore them from this backup one mailbox at a time.

When my brick level's got too slow, we purchased a 3rd party product called Power tools. We now backup the actual database files for exchange - using Open File Manager and a registry entry. I do this in addition to the information store backup. Power controls can open the actual database files (95% of the time) and you can do individual mailbox restores from there. However, I'm hearing V11+ will not let you backup the actual Exchange files period. :( That's why I have not upgraded.

Anyway, long story short:

Information Store backup = VERY NECESSARY

Bricklevel only needed if you need individual mailbox restores (and you don't have another way to do it). - Obvioulsy someone could say that you can restore the entire information store to a temporary exchange server and get indivdual mailboxes that way....

Debi
 
Hey Debi,

I think the thing you're looking for is this reg hack (to backup the Exchange DB files even if a dbagent is installed):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \ SOFTWARE \ ComputerAssociates \ BrightStor ARCserve Backup \ Base \ Task \ Backup \ SkipDSAFiles

Default is 1. Set to 0 to force backup of database files

By default if you install a database agent on ARCserve then ARCserve will not backup those files (i.e. Exchange database files *.edb etc), avoiding the errors in the activity log for open files. This can also be set on NT Agent machines, when the machine is remote from the ARCserve machine.

I think it was broken in some earlier r11.x versions, but as far as I'm aware this is now fixed in the latest builds(and if not should be fixed). This reg hack has been around as far back as I can remember.
 
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