Slow Exchange Mailbox backup

[grubgal]

Backup Exec 10
Exchange 2003
Server 2003 SP1

I am getting throughput of ~52MB/min when backing up my exchange mailboxes. This is a remote server. Last night it took 7 hours to back up ~21GB of mailboxes.

I don't really think that it's the connection to this server. I'm getting up to >500mb/min backing up other info on this server. It's just specifically the mailboxes that are taking such a long time.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Prydonian]

Grubgal;

I've run into this in the past and I've done a few things that helped, but be aware that due to the nature of the beast, brick level back ups of Exchange mailboxes will always be slower than other types of backups.

1. The default maintenance schedule for Exchange 2K and 2K3 is 1am to 5am. This is pretty CPU intensive and all by itself, it can peg the CPU of even a good server. If that's when your backups are scheduled, either resched the backups or change the maintenance schedule.

2. If you're running something like NAV on the Exchange server, try turning it off during the backups. BE backups up the individual mailboxes by impersonating a mailbox and authenticating against each item in the mailbox. Depending on how NAV is configured, you may be forcing a virus scan on each and every piece of mail that is "opened" for backup.

3. Try doing a periodic defrag of your Exchange server. This will take a loooong time, but may help things.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I only get around 90MB/min on brick levels while I get 700+ on everything else.

Let me know what you find!

Mike, The IT Guy




Life is too short to drink warm beer....

 

[grubgal]

I changed the scheduled Exchange server maintenance to a time when the mailboxes will not be backing up. My backup Friday was slightly faster, but not a considerable amount. I will check the NAV configuration next.

Thanks for the input.

 

[M3Parker]

at the beginning of sept. our backups were taking 1.5-2hrs and since the end of sept, we've been experiencing very long backup run times like 5-10hrs! after checking the job history, 85% of the backup time is occuring on eserver mailboxes.

any ideas as to why it was short at one time, then jumped to a greater amount of time? is there a way to see what files are taking the longest in the mailboxes?