Why are backups of exchange public folders inconsistent?

[Guest_imported]

I had Exchange 5.5, Arcserve 2000 + Exchange Agent installed on a Win NT PDC. Despite selecting Public Folders and checking that all public folders were selected, the scheduled backup always managed to ignore whole sets of public folders on every session.

I now have a Win2000 member server running Arcserve 2000 (SP3) + Exchange Agent that accesses the Exchange 5.5 server over the network. The situation has not changed, with seemingly random backups of selected public folders.

I cannot remember the number of times I have propogated client permissions to subfolders. DBAGENT has all the required permissions but even on one-off backups of public folders, the situation is no better and I am concerned that a number of subfolders are also being ignored. The logs show no permissions errors. Surely, if it was a problem with permissions, then no folders would be backed-up.

 

[tbeeber]

Are there any errors in the agent logs?

Here's a possible solution I saw, from CA document 16119

http://support.ca.com/techbases/asnt/16119.html

The imortant nugget is all the way at the bottom:

The DBAgent account must be set up as a "Reviewer" at a minimum for each public folder. This will allow the DBAgent account the ability to backup the folder.

Hope this helps.

 

[Guest_imported]

Thanks for the info, but this inconsistency continues to makes little sense.
For all public folders, dbagent is an owner, which only adds to the mystery of why public folder backups are a hit or miss affair. Sometimes it gets a folder - other times it does not. Without making any permission changes, the same repeated backup job will get some folders and totally ignore others, having identical permissions, without so much as an entry in any of the logs.

I'll try REVIEWER for dbagent, but I don't see why OWNER cannot work for all folders/subfolders.