MS Exchange backups

[Steve Mason]

-----Original Message-----
From: mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info
[mailto:mailscanner-bounces at lists.mailscanner.info] On Behalf Of Denis
Beauchemin
Sent: November 23, 2007 1:04 PM
To: MailScanner
Subject: OT: MS Exchange backups

Hello all,

I know this is not related to MS, but you guys know so much about everything
that I risk the question: what backup solution works with MS Exchange?

The admins responsible for our Exchange server tried Tivoli Storage Manager
(TSM) and Backup Exec but couldn't backup our 250GB data within reasonable
time: it takes about 48 hours to achieve one full backup!  
And this got worse when we added McAfee's GroupShield to the mix...

I think they use Backup Exec's "brick-level backup" to backup to a local
disk and then use this copy when they need to restore emails.  They first
tried TSM but had to resort to restoring the full email DB whenever they
needed to restore one email...



Brick level backups are generally said to be bad by most Exchange experts
(google "Ed Crowley" and "Brick level")

Many 3rd party backup programs support agents to do Exchange backups, but
many find it best to do a standard ntbackup to a .bkf file, then have
whatever backup software the rest of the enterprise uses, pick that file up.
The down side, is for a restore, you need to restore the .bkf, then restore
Exchanger from that file. On a big Exchnage box, that can add a fair amount
of time.