Backup suddenly very slow

[brainy]

For the last couple of months, my BE 9 SBS on Win 2K SBS has been running very slowly. It takes from 6 - 8 hours to backup around 50 GB. It used to take perhaps half that, and it began rather suddenly.

This is on a Dat1 40/80 drive in a Dell PE server using hardware compression only. Any idea what could have changed to cause this?

 

[justin2000]

Check the System logs for any errors - particularly Event ID 7,9,11 and 15 - these signify hardware errors on the tape drive/tapes themselves.

Also - do you know which part of the backup is taking longer? brick level mailbox backups?

 

[brainy]

Just getting back to this issue. I think the culprit is in the Exchange mailbox backup (not sure if this is what you referred to as brick level). Throughput was down to 20 MB/min, whereas the Exchange Store was closer to 200 MB/min, as were the System State and file system portions of the backup. Here is a piece of the log, showing that it took over 14 hours to back up about 19 GB of mailboxes.

Backup of "\\[ServerName]\Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes "
Backup Type: FULL - Back Up Files - Reset Archive Bit
Backup started on 2/4/2006 at 1:00:44 AM.
Backup completed on 2/4/2006 at 3:42:07 PM.
Backed up 340527 mail message(s) in 2319 folder(s) in 50 mailbox(es)
Processed 18,689,879,946 bytes in 14 hours, 41 minutes, and 23 seconds.
Throughput rate: 20.2 MB/min

Is there something else I might need to be doing with my Exchange DB that would improve this? Do I even need to back up the Store if I am backing up the mailboxes?

 

[58sniper]

I wouldn't backup the store AND do brick levels. I backup the store, and if I need to restore, I can restore to the Recovery Storage Group and go from there. MUCH less work for the backups, less tape being used, etc.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[brainy]

Thanks. It makes sense that it would be faster, but I'm a little light on backup knowledge here. A couple of times, I have had to restore just a portion of one user's mailbox to get back some deleted messages, which brings up two questions:

1. Wouldn't this be somewhat more difficult from just a store backup?
2. What is the most efficient way to do this from a store backup? Can you suggest an online document describing the process?

Thanks again.

 

[58sniper]

Restore the store to the Recovery Storage Group, then exmerge out from there to a .pst file, then into the normal mailbox.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)