Must shut down Exchange to get a "REAL" backup??? 1

[Pointfreak]

Hello.

Our IT department has recently informed us that our Exchange 5.5 server must be shut down daily in order to get a "REAL" backup. We use Arcserve with the Exchange agent, but the claim is that "By the time Arcserve backs up the database, the log files have changed, and you end up with a mismatched backup".

We are not a large company (150 accounts). I find it very hard to believe that fortune 500 companies around the globe are shutting down their production servers daily, just to make backups! Must we really do this? Doesnt Arcserve take this into account?

It is my belief that something is just not setup correctly.

Thanks! [sig][/sig]

 

[AlexIT]

I use NTBackup too, but I have an exmerge batch file set up first. Now I have every mailbox written as a .pst file to an additional area. Makes a single user restore easy...

Alex

 

[lifegard2]

Are there any items to consider when creating an Exchange server as a non-production box? Basically, I want to create a second Exchange server to use as a practice ground to restore Exchage. Are there any things I need to consider when doing this, such as:

1. Are there any problems with having the production and non-production Exchange servers on the LAN at the same time?

2. Does the non-production Exchange server need to have the same machine name as the production Exchange server? (If yes, that would definitely answer question 1 above.)

3. Anything else I need to be aware of that I might be forgetting?

 

[soonerland]

The largest problem with stopping the services to do a backup is that the log files are not committed and won't be deleted unless you manually delete them. This is not an acceptable practice for disaster recovery. Offline backups do not commit the log files.

 

[AlexIT]

The pratice Exchange server must have the same machine name as the production Exchange server. Otherwise your "restore" would wind up being a migration. Keep it on a different network entirely. If you can somehow swing it, I'd try to keep similar hardware for the test server too, not to have a machine with different drivers and such. (I have the same tape drives, SCSI controllers but test network server memory and disk space is much less. Sometimes I wish I'd got the whole thing identical, then could switch boxes if something really crashes.)

Alex

 

[N0ktar]

My lab server is identical to my exchange server and it's a domain controller, that way I can use it if the primary goes down.
It sits off the network, not plugged in at all. If I need to load some updates I just plug it in on different subnet for a few min and get it up to spead.

 

[tmannouris]

We are having trouble getting the Arcserve Exchange 5.5 agent to work at all...Anyone able to decipher any of the following error codes? 402, 418 & 602. I have used veritas with the exchange agent before without issue and configuration was very simple, am I missing something obvious? What I really want is a smug and patronising reply explaining how simple it is, alternatively a long winded, complicated explanation will do...either way it'll be more help than Arcserve support have been, who reply to an email after two weeks asking if we are using the Arcserve agent and who have not got back to us since we told them, for the second time, that we were.