Backing up Exchange = SLOW

[LhasaGary]

Hi Guys,

I'm sure you have heard this one before but Backup Exec is very very slow backing up Exchange.
The rate is 53 MB/Min! It can take up to 11 hours to backup 33Gb.
Are there any tips to try and speed this up?

Thanks,
Gary

[Ken_Putnam]

If you are talking about Stores backups, yes, this is very slow

If these are brick level (mailbox backups) this is actually quite good.  we've seen reports of speeds in the 20-25 MB/min on decent hardware

Are you sure you want to do mailbox backups?   There used to  be good post at tekscan.com, but they've finally taken it down  Let me see if I can find it somewhere

[Edward_Charles]

The reason brick level backup are slow:

We know the individual Mailbox backups (called brick layer) are very slow by design (MAPI limitation) since Backup Exec has to impersonate an Exchange mailbox account and authenticate for each individual mailbox item, whereas a database backup is streamed to Backup Exec in one continuous data package.

Here are some comparisons FYI below: (you can see that excluding that 1 large mailbox freed up at least 8 hours of backup time!)

Mailboxes: (1 390000 messages Mailbox Included)

Backed up 472078 mail messages in 505 folders in 16 mailbox(es)

Processed 27,937,099,155 bytes in  9 hours,  46 minutes, and  12 seconds.

Throughput rate: 45.5 MB/min

 Mailboxes: (1 390000 messages Mailbox Excluded)

Backed up 80244 mail messages in 491 folders in 15 mailbox(es)

Processed 19,402,336,639 bytes in  1 hour,  14 minutes, and  5 seconds.

Throughput rate: 250 MB/min

For comparison, here are the results for backing up just the information store:

Information Store:

Backed up 2 Exchange Server stores

Backed up 11 Exchange Server logs

Processed 88,594,884,130 bytes in  29 minutes and  46 seconds.

Throughput rate: 2838 MB/min

Hope that helps a bit.

This is probably another reason to explore and learn Symantec Backup Exec 12 with CPS!

Regards,