Optimizing Exchange mailbox backups?

[SirFalstaff]

Is there any info out there on optimizing Exchange mailbox ida backups. They are nice to have but the backup times are becoming prohibitively long

 

[605]

In fact, this is the downside about the mailbox backups. It generates an overwhelming overhead which makes the BU really slow - no matter which BU software you use. In a very similar way, you may compare file with image backups.

The only way out is not to use this feature.

 

[baddos]

Just setup a subclient that backs up the mailboxes of the important career saving positions. Restoring the CEO's email is a great thing.

Everyone else have them use the Deleted Items Retension feature built into Exchange/Outlook.

 

[theravager]

3rd party agents that run at a storage level are the only way to do this with any sort of efficiency.

Having said that, its pretty effortless to restore a mailbox from a storage group backup these days.

 

[birky]

take a look at using Data Classifcation Enabler (DCE)...this reduces the scan time for mbx backups

details should be in Books Online



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[Cyklops]

You might also consider breaking up the content of the document level iDA into multiple subclients. This will improve performance. I assume you backup the mailbox iDA to disk media (ie MagLib)?

regards

 

[SirFalstaff]

The main call we have for doing this type of backup is for individual mail item type restores. We used to depend on deleted items retention for those types of restores but the datastores are getting rather large for their disks, so that was reduced. Restore requests are rare, but do happen from time to time.

DCE looked promising, but the documentation says it can only be used on a proxy, which won't be happening anytime soon.

I have broken the backups into multiple sub clients hopefully that will help. All Exchange backups go to disk, and are Auxed to tape for shipment to Iron Mountain.

 

[mrfokker]

We used this feature and stopped it because of the problems you were describing. We now backup the entire Exchange Database nightly, which in our case is 125G and then backup this file to disk and then to tape using Commvault. seems to work well if you have a lab environment where you can recover the exchange database to in case of DR or trying to find an important email from months ago.

 

[birky]

there is no real way of optimizing exchange mbx as it's dependant on MAPI (if DCE isn't an option)

As previously posted you can configure multiple subclients to split up the mbx's & run them at the same time to hit it with multiple streams but, difficult to improve the thruput of each stream



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer