BackupExec Throughput Dies when backing up Exchange

[bvs]

Monday I started having problems with my backup exec jobs. I'm using one tape to backup my exchange and file servers. The incremental backup is about 30 gigs and usually takes around 5 hours.

Well the past two mornings I've come in and the backup has been runninng for 10 hours and is only half done. I've examined the job logs and I found that the backup starts with the C: drive on the exchange server with a throughput of about 140 mb/min. It then moves on to the exchange mailboxes and it dies. The throughput drops to 20 mb/min and the job is still running when I get in the next morning.

I'm using BE 8.6 and Exchange 2000 and backing up from a Win2K server (the file server)

Any ideas what to look at? I'm stumped.

 

[aluko]

I'm getting the same problem too, the throughput has dropped to 19.7MB/min and the backup is now taking days. I'm using version 8.6 on NT server, tape device is a Compaq 20/40 gb dlt and is connected via a scsi pci card.

 

[bvs]

at least I'm not alone. Have you changed anything on your exchange server lately?

 

[justin2000]

bvs and aluko,

Has anything changed on your network, servers anything lately? Have you changed virus software added anything at all? If not...

Check the system event log, see if you are getting any SCSI errors, specifically, Event ID's 7,9,11,15 - these indicate hardware errors and will slow your backups.

 

[aluko]

Justin2000, many thanks for your reply. I've just recently built this server for BE 8.6. The previous server was running BE 7.3, the Compaq tape device was attached to it and the throughput was about 200MB/min which is about right. Since connecting the tape device to the new server, I have been experiencing this problem, as per your advise I've checked the system event log and could see many event id 7. I will now concentrate my efforts into resolving this hardware error. In the meantime if you know any specific reasons for this error, please let me know.

 

[bvs]

I'm getting no hardware errors and I haven't changed anything lately.

My throughput is pretty good on the other areas of my backups, it just dies on the exchange mailboxes.

 

[justin2000]

bvs

Exchange mailbox backups are going to be slower than normal file backups - how much slower its hard to say.

What the backup does is very similar to doing an export of the mailbox or using exmerge.

Things that can cause slowness, I have had this issue at work, when doing exports, as I don't do mailbox backups - we use Symantec anti-virus for exchange - and it was setup in vsapi/mapi mode - changing it to mapi sped things up considerably - if you are running symantec, try doing the same, symantec do have a batch file u can use to change to mapi mode and then back to vsapi/mapi mode after the backup.

do a search of backup in the symantec knowledgebase, you will find it.

 

[aluko]

Problem solved! When we migrated to BE 8.6 we also had to upgrade the agent version on each server that we are backing up, unfortunately that all the servers we re-booted. Once rebooted the problem resolved. Thank Justin2000 for your efforts.