Exchange Private Store backup - How long should it take?

[customgt]

I did a full private store backup on saturday, it took 17 hours to do a full backup (just the private email store)

im on hour 16 of the differential backup of the private email store and its still running...

Is this normal? It is backing up to a 2.0 usb drive. Which ive used the firewire cable also and it really wasnt much difference...

The private mailbox store is 24gig in size, looks like around 70 mailboxes....

 

[customgt]

this is on an intel xeon 3.0ghz
2GB ram
sbs2003 sp2

 

[cajuntank]

That's not a lot of RAM left for BackupExec to use with all of the other services running under SBS.
What version of BackupExec?
What does your drive IO system look like? SATA,SAS, Hardware array, Software array, RAID5, etc...?

 

[customgt]

backupexec 10d

4 sata drives on raid 5 with 1 hotspare. Its a hardware raid.

 

[cajuntank]

MAPI is extremely slow back in the first place. RAID5 is good for read intensive applications, horrible for Exchange since it writes so much. SATA isn't helping much either compartitive to SAS drives.
See link below for this common issue:

http://seer.support.veritas.com/docs/264851.htm

 

[dougs666]

Our experience over several releases is that the brick level backups are very slow and probably always will be. What the vendor (then named Veritas) told us is that a brick level backup is done by having a special e-mail account created as part of setting up the backup exec retrieve (or restore) the mail by signing on to each account, "reading" your e-mail and copying what it "reads" to the backup drive. This "trick" is OK for small organizations but, like an interpreter vs. a compiler, it takes a lot longer than a direct copy. And the backup rate slows dramatically as the job progresses for some reason -- garbage collection not happening??

To get the backup done within the nightly window, we backup Exchange to a folder in parallel with the rest of the backup operation and then copy the folder out to the backup device the next morning. Seems to work OK, although it is still two 12 hour jopbs running in parallel.

See also:

https://forums.symantec.com/syment/board/message?board.id=101&message.id=4728&query.id=54977#M4728

A work around to speed things up is in a Symantec doc @

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/264851.htm

but it involves disabling the Anti-Virus for the during of the backups -- me? I'd rather have a backup problem than a virus problem.

BTW: While you may like the idea of being able restore individual mail, I read that there can be significant downsides -- each attachment that was saved only once by Exchange may appear in every mail box CC'd after a restore. And some stuff other than mail will not be restored without an "offline" backup. You will need both from time to time from what I read.