Backup exec 12 or 12.5 and exchange 2003 backups and restores

[sysep12]

Is the only way to restore an individual email from backup lto tape by using grt and requiring the entire store size as free space on the local array of the exchange server?  We are talking one email in a 250 gb store!

This takes apprx 5 hours.  Please tell me there is another way.

Is there a specific setup for backup of exchange mail store to tape and then being able to restore it? IE does it need to be a separate job not using aofo?  Or can aofo be used to backup exchange using grt?

I am surprised at how vague these answers are out there so i hope the forum can answer them clearly and correctly.

fyi we have a mail message that fails to restore and actually mailbox store fails to restore even though backup exec says backup is successful and you can see the message to restore from restore tab.

We are using an external drive to create the temp storage space the information store requires.

does backup exec 2010 allow you to restore individual mail messages faster and differently?

[DominikG]

If you try to restore directly from tape, Backup Exec has to use the temporary staging area, configured under "Tools" -> "Options" for staging the whole backup and then extracting the single element.
As GRT is a tape based technology, this procedure is mandatory, but done automatically by Backup Exec.
So if the temporary staging area is configured to be e.g. on a USB drive, it is clearly to say, that there should be the problem because the restore has to stage from the tape library through the BE server (which is quite fast ; LAN, or FC) onto the USB drive (which is slow) and then back from the drive (slow) through the BE Server to the Exchnage Server (LAN).

So please consider the way, the restore has to go.
It makes sense to put the staging area to a local disk or space which got a fast connection.

best regards

Dominik

If my post answeres your question / solves your problem, I would appreciate if you mark it as the solution. Thank you.

[Hemant_Jain]

Backup Exec 11d introduced GRT as a feature for Exchange Agent. Traditionally before 11d, you had an option to perform brick-level mailbox backup, which was extremely slow during backup because of its dependency on MAPI. Hence in Backup Exec 11d, GRT was introduced using which you do not need to backup mailboxes in addition to backing up information store. Now, you get an option to backup information store, but in restore you can select individual messages for restore. But, when implementing GRT with tapes, it becomes challenging, because Backup Exec needs to get the exchange database files on a disk to be able to mount and extract mails from it. Hence, for tape backup it will be required to stage the data to a disk before you could restore individual items. So, best way out is to avoid using tapes for GRT and use disk instead to perform backups, may be every 15 days, depending on how often do you need to restore messages and what kind of retention you would like to keep. If you backup to disk, you will not need any staging for obvious reasons. So, with disk backup you save on time in backup as well as restore.

Still if you are not happy about GRT, and want to fail over to older ways of backup, i.e. individual mailboxes and restore mailboxes, you can use following document to configure the same:
http://support.veritas.com/docs/285797

If you use the legacy method, staging would not be needed in restores. Backup Exec 2010 uses the same technology for backups and restores, hence no changes there.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.
Thanks

[sysep12 · Accepted solution]

 i created a RSG group in exchange and then made space locally on the array and restore was successful. symantec products are very unreliable.