Exchange 2000 backups using BE 11d

[Matthew_Wharton]

Hi.

I have an Exchange 2000 Server running on Windows 2000 Server with BE 11d (trial version for now - going to purchase before the end of the month / when i have resolved this issue) backing up to an external SDLT drive

Basically... what's the best way to backup Exchange 2000? apparently i dont need to backup individual mailboxes anymore? i went to a conference in Birmingham recently and the guy who spoke about it made it sound really easy, but i just want to make sure i am doing things correctly.

Here are the selections i have available, please could someone let me know which ones to select to perform a decent backup? (it would be handy to backup all mailboxs, public folders etc with a view to fitting it into our backup window of 13 hours if possible? - if full mailbox backups cant be done within this time i can do them over the weekend when we are closed)

* C (o/s)
* D (exchsrvr)
* E (exchsrvr)
* M (wyjs.org.uk)
* System State
* Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes
* Microsoft Exchange Public Folders
* Microsoft Information Store

Favourite Resources:
* wyjs_exch.joint.org.uk (in here are above and some share drives)

Any help will be great

Thanks

Matthew Wharton

[David_Sanz]

Matthew

Theoretically, you should backup the System State and the volumes if you want to, in case a disaster occurs, and with Exchange backup up the information store is enough, because, thanks to GRT, although you can't backup individual items, you will be able to restore them.

The best choice would be to backup Exchange first to disk, then duplicate to tape. If Exchange backups are only on tape, any restore needs a temporary restore to disk of the entire Information Store (even if yoy just want an individual mail!).

But if you look through this forum you will see there are so many issues having to do with GRT. In my case, I complain because GRT doen't recycle disk backups properly, causing a potential lack of disk space if you don't do it manually. And there are many more issues.

Regards

[Philip_Pearson]

Personally I backup the mail boxes as well, just in case and I have plenty of room.

The biggest issue you will have is with permissions.

The backup exec account needs to have full access to all mailboxes and it needs a mailbox of its own.

One good test is to setup an account,
give it a mailbox,
log onto a workstation with the account,
setup the mail profile,
open additional mailboxes at random to ensure that you have full access to them.
Check the ntfs permissions to the mail stores etc

There is no need to backup the mailboxes individually and I have successfully restored mail from the mailstore backup. I just don't trust this product entirely at this stage due to the multitude of issues that are arising. As long as I have the space I will keep backing up both.

[Philip_Pearson]

Hola David, como estas.

[Russ_Perry]

Here are my recommendations:

Back up all Drives and System state for file backups.
Back up Exchange Information Store, mailboxes, and public folders
Any shares that are located on your local drives are backed up as those drives. There shouldn't be a need to back things up twice but if your 'M (wyjs.org.uk)' share is mapped, of course back it up. Just be sure the account Backup Exec will be using can see the mapped drive as well or back it up as a UNC path.

Exceptions:
If you're mailbox backup is very long, you may want to:
- Decrease the frequency of the mailbox backups
- Only back up the most important mailboxes
- Set a deleted item retention period on the mail messages

Once GRT is working properly just eliminate the mailboxes and public folders from the backup. Right now, there are problems with seeing some mailboxes and restoring messages with embedded items, attachments, or HTML formatting.

Russ