Backing up individual Exchange Mailboxes

[kythri]

To backup individual mailboxes, I'd add the saveset "MSEXCH:MB" to the client configuration, correct?

Are there any caveats about backing up the individual boxes? I've thought that I've read something that says this takes an extraordinary amount of time/CPU to do. Our Exchange cluster has about 1000 mailboxes currently.

Thank you!

 

[john7]

Depending on how many mailboxes you backup, it can take a long time. If you just want to backup a subset of the 1000, then it is not to bad. If you want to backup all of them good luck.

Also you can not do a DR of the exchange server, you still need to do a normal backup of the exchange server.

john7

 

[mtibboh]

Be sure that this is really what you want.
Making backups of individual mailboxes is really a very slow proces. Against negative advice management at our office insisted on it. The backup of the exchange server now takes almost 24 hours and finishes just in time for the next schedule.
If you decide to do so, here is some advice that might help to improve the performance:
- The performance problem IS on the exchange server. During backup every mailbox is being extracted from the live exchange database to a seperate local (on exchange server) file and then that file is backuped up. Every transaction, also the extraction of mailboxes, is logged by the exchange server. If all of the involved files are on the same disk (or raidset), that disk is going to be very busy. So to improve performance you might consider to have seperate disks for the Exchange transaction logging and for the Networker temp storage.

 

[kythri]

How many users do you have, and what are the specs of your Exchange server?

 

[mtibboh]

About 450 mailboxes.
I don't know much about the specs of the Echange server.
It is managed by another department; we only do the backup.
I know it is a 2 cpu Win NT box running Exchange 5.5.
The Information Store is almost 30GB on backuptape (compressed). But it isn't the amount of data as such. We have other backup clients with more data that do finish within a reasonable amount of time.

 

[rtammel]

What about Exchange 2000? Is this performance problem solved in
Exchange 2000??

 

[mtibboh]

I don't know, because we didn't got it working right.
During the test period we had several problems, which mostly had to do with version conflicts between Networker, Exchange en the Outlook libs on exchange. The backups of the IS and such were alright, but the backup of individual mailboxes... well, see some other threads in this forum.

 

[kythri]

OK, I've done a bit of testing so far with our Exchange 2K servers.

Each machine is a Quad Xeon 900/2mb with 4gb RAM.

Server 1 is backing up one individual MB.

20MB - 6m58s

Server 2 is backing up 7 individual MB

206mb - 10m50s
267mb - 15m03s
216mb - 03m50s
309mb - 04m27s
256mb - 05m01s
82mb - 08m30s
185mb - 05m28s

These were just test backups of real mailboxes - we have over 1000 mailboxes, and are working a test to see how impacted our mailservers get.

I'll continue to post more information as I get it.

 

[ceren]

Hi,
I use Legato server 6.1.2 for true64 and use exchange 2000 with a machine 2 cpus 1Gb RAM.
I backup 460 mailboxes every day.Size is nearly 40GB.
I splited mailboxes into 8 text files and give this files as input file.Start 8 files paralel.It takes nearly 16 hours to complete.

 

[kythri]

Ceren:

Can you post your configuration for this here?

 

[ceren]

I have 8 text files including mails.each file includes 50-60 mailboxes.I created 8 client for the same exchange machine.each client uses different text file as input file.you write your input file to the backup command of client.example nsrxchsv -I mail1.txt
Each client save set have one mailbox from using input file like MSEXCH:MB/ceren ER
text files also in this format.You can find additional info using text input files in the legato exchange module admin guide 3.1 page 72.
any additional detail you need?

 

[kythri]

Does each client defined count against the number of clients you are licensed for?

 

[ceren]

no.it counts only one client license.You can have different saveset for same client by creating same client several times and it is good that counts only one.

 

[MadSeason11]

i went down the route of the individual mailbox backup (against my better judgement) and it was nothing but pain. we have 3 quad xeon servers (900s) with 4 gb of ram backing up about 750 - 1000 users on each (figure 60 -75 GB per server). took etirely too long -well over 24 hrs (apparently users seem to think the mail servers are file servers). way too processor intensive and not worth it. went back to the good old MSEXCH:IS backup, everything gets done in under 3 hrs.