Disaster Recovery - Exchange 5.5 1

[danielrnz]

Help!
I am banging my head against a large brick wall here. Let me describe my situation. We have a client of ours using Arserve 2000 on Windows NT 4.0 to backup two machines, a pdc and a exchange 5.5 server. we are testing a disaster recovery in which both machine are damaged/destroyed so we are trying to get a seperate machine (different hardware) up and running as quick as possible combining both machines roles. Recoving the sam is quite easy as pointed out by a forum member here (convinced me to join!) but getting the DS and IS seems to be too hard. the client is using the 2k/nt4 client to back up the machine and the exchange client to back up the exchange. i have tried all options that i can think of to restore the files/stores but nothing seems to work and i am sick of installing nt (15 times already). If anyone has managed a similar situation or could point in the direction of a semi decent documnet from ca then that would be greatly appreciated

cheers

Dan

 

[ARCserveGuru]

Have you opted on doing a DR type backup whereby you shut down the exchange services and do a flat file backup of the exchange DS and IS? Then a flat file restore? Makes things a little easier.

g

 

[mspope]

Microsoft Exchange 5.5 Disaster Recovery:

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techinfo/administration/55/BackupRestore.asp

 

[danielrnz]

that is a last resort option as far as the client is concerned as they bought the exchnage client agent off of us for a fair whack of money and want it to work (before my time). plus all the regular backups that tehy do use the client and as i understand it what you are talking about is an offline backup? which they unfortunately dont do thanks for the ideas though

cheers dan

 

[Cyklops]

Checked all of these ??

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/16040.html

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/16155.html

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/Dbaexch.html

http://support.ca.com/techbases/as2000/as2k-1400.html

regards

 

[dtolman]

Unless your restoring the DS to the original server, its usually not feasible to perform a restore of it.

Best bet in this case is to reinstall Exchange, make sure you keep the same names for organization and site, and do an IS only restore through the exchange agent.

 

[danielrnz]

thanks for your help guys but i have solved it now. I had been given the wrong organisation name to use and the wrong machine name!!! after that it worked fine. just as a side note has anyone had any problems using setup /r with exchange 5.5? just gave me errors? in the end i set it up as normal then deleted everything the the dsadata and mdbdata folders, restored and then started the services bam! all done sweet!

cheers

Daniel