Exchange backup not backing up everything 2

[dpu]

I have something bizarre happening to my nightly Exchange backup. I use the NT backup utility on my W2K3 box. Every morning I check the back ups and it is usually around 20+ GB. Then all of a sudden my backups have shrunk to 4 - 9 GB? So what happened to the rest of the data? Email and exchange appear to be working fine but I am not sure what happened to the data.

 

[ShackDaddy]

It could be that you finally got a good backup of Exchange and it truncated all those 5mb transaction logs that had accumulated.

Check the logs for the backup before the smaller one and compare it to a more recent one. Examine the logs and they will tell you how large each volume was.

Are you backing up the Exchange data directory OR are you backing up the Information Store? The latter is the right answer, and if you have the IS, in most situations you don't really need to back up the mdbdata directory.


Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[Zelandakh]

Can you detail exactly what you are backing up and prior to the small backup, look at the logs and see if it says "Error", or "Failure" which would explain a lot.

 

[dpu]

I am using NT backup and I just back up the Exchsrvr directory. I back up the mdbdata directory and usually at the end of the back up the log files are cleared out but I am noticing that they are still in there. The priv1.edb is 14+GB and the .stm is 10+GB and the backup file is less than the two files combined.

 

[ShackDaddy]

It sounds like you aren't backing it up properly. Instead of backing up the exchsvr directory, drill down in a lower selection of the NTBackup selection list and find the Microsoft Information Store. Select that in your backups, and you'll be doing a proper Exchange backup.

If you are running Windows Small Business Server 2003, the SBS backup wizard will automatically include the Information Store.

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting

 

[wahnula]

Here's a link that explains the process:

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Exchange-2003-Backup-Restore-NTBACKUP.html

Tony

Users helping Users...

 

[ShackDaddy]

Ok, on the backup file size, that's probably because the databases always stay the same size that they were AT THEIR LARGEST. You may have deleted a lot of data or cleared out some mailboxes, and by doing so saved a lot of room, but the datbases will still look as big as they ever were.... But when you back up your databases, your backup is more likely to reflect the size of the actual data in your databases, and will exclude all the whitespace that was created by deleting messages and mailboxes.

Look in your app event log for 1221 events. They are part of the mailbox management process that does an online defrag of your mailboxes. Those events report how much free space was left INSIDE your databases after the defrag process completed. If you subtract the number mentioned in the 1221 event from the size of the .edb/.stm files, you will have the actual size of your database.

To shrink your database down to the size of the actual data, you'd have to do an offline defrag, but there are all sorts of good reasons NOT to do that. As you can see, the backup automatically compresses all the white space in your database, so having a large database file doesn't actually impact your backups.

Dave Shackelford
Shackelford Consulting