BE 10 Exchange 2003 mailbox backup contra DB backup Performance issue?

[Mikael_Jensen_2]

I have a performance issue when running backup of an exchange server.
When running a backup of the entire DB, the backup runs fine, 700MB/minute.
But when running a mailbox backup, it crawls to an annoying 30MB/minute.
Same Hardware, same software,
CPU and memory only 10% utilized,
Gbit Network only 1% utilized.
Tried with both Exchange SP1 and SP2, and BE 10d
Anyone seen this issue?

Sincerely
Mikael Jensen
mij@pcs.dk

[Luis_Sakihama]

Hi Mikael,

there ara some fact to be aware:

When you back up the DB Backup Exec opens the file once and back it up. When you back up mailboxes, Backup Exec opens and closes every mailbox so the time it takes is longer.

There are more information is this link:
http://mail.tekscan.com/nomailboxes.htm

Hope this helps

[Mikael_Jensen_2]

I am allready aware of these documents,
they talk about some performance degrade...
But when doing a remote DB backup of the 20 Gigs it takes 20 Minutes.
When doing a remote mailbox backup it takes 10 Hours. ???

This is the same issue when doing a local backup to disk,
20 minutes with DB Backup, 10 Hours with Mailbox Backup.

Any ideas?

[Ortho_Lawton]

It's the same for everyone that does brick level backups I'm afraid.
When you back up the database it's backed up as a single file, to backup mailboxes and public folders BE has to use MAPI to open each mailbox in turn and then backup every email message individually.
That means instead of doing one large file at once it's reading and backing up perhaps millions of individual items.

The same thing happens to a lesser extent backing up files from a hard drive, it's MUCH faster backing up one 20Gb file than backing up 2 million 10Kb files

[Ari_Hietamaki]

Brick level backup from Exchange mailboxes is something like 10 to 50 times slower than native database backup through Microsoft dll's. With few mailboxes that is not a issue but with bigger exchange servers it is. Best way for bigger exchange servers is to get database level backup's and if you need to recover one mailbox then use Exchange recovery storage group to do that.

[H_W]

Hi Mikael,

I am having the same problem - except my mailbox backup was working fine - then for some reason stopped. I have tried all the Antivirus exclusions from my exchange server but still continue to get the problem.

Could someone maybe post there settings of successful backups of there exchange server and we could see if our settings are different and possibly find a solution.

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

Please note that generally mailbox backup is slow.

Stop the antivirus service during the bacup of mailboxes.

Please refer the following technotes:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/264851

http://support.veritas.com/docs/237444


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