Exchange 2003 mailbox backup: 0xe000fe2d - The backup of the item is bad

[Robert_Duker]

I am backing up Exchange 2003 sp1 and I continually get this error and my backups fail every day, even though I can restore and all files/mailboxes appear to be intact. I get the follwing error and the backup of the mailbox store takes 6 hours for 107 mailboxes.


In the Log:

Completed status: Failed
Final error: 0xe000fe2d - The backup of the item is bad.
Final error category: Resource Errors

And the detail message is:

Unable to backup the attachment data associated with one or more messages. Some messages and their attachments may have been deleted while the backup was already in progress.

I've already tried the Registry entry Fail on corrupt files to 0 and it didn't work.

How can I get a successful backup and make this error go away?Message was edited by:
Robert Duker

[Swati_Joshi]

Hi Robert!

In this case i would suggest you to follow following steps:

1. Verify if any users are selected for backup whose mailboxes no longer exist. Deselect these users from backup.

2. Stop Antivirus services during backup window.

3. If using Advance Open File Option (AOFO) for backup, uncheck it.

4. Verify if the option "Enable single instance backup for message attachments (for mailbox and public folder backups only)" is enabled. If yes, uncheck and verify the results.

5. You say that "some mails may have been deleted",exclude these mails while backup.

Please revert back with details.
Regards.

Note:If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked "assumed answered" and would be moved to "answered questions pool".

[Robert_Duker]

Ok,

1. Did that before when I was having issues with disabled accounts that needed to remain for 90 days before deleting: Just denied logon but left the account active to comply with Corporate account retention policies. errors went away. Found no difference in the backups between fully activated and denied logon accounts.

2. Turned off "when opened for backup" in SAV.

3. Had problems with that earlier, turned it off prior to this problem.

4. Going to try that one tonight, it is currently checked, unchecking it for tonight's backup.

5. I can't find which email attachments are causing the trouble, since the backup log does not identify them.

Backup of mailbox store alone still takes 8 hours. (50 Gb, 107 mailboxes) any suggestions?

[Robert_Duker]

OK,
update:

Turned of "Single instance..." and that cleared up the errors, giving me my first successful backup since installing the exchange agent.

THANK YOU!!!

But this caused something unusual, the backup logs don't say anything is backed up. It's all 0's now. Hmmm.

Hold on, now I see. I have to go to detail now to find the true results with the full number of mailboxes and files backed up. Odd, but acceptable. I'll do a mailbox restore just to make sure though.

the only problem remaining: 8 hours to back up the Mailbox store. Is there anything I can do to shave some time off that? By backup is barely ending before the start of the next work day...

[Deepali_Badave]

Hello,

try stopping the antivirus service.

Please keep us updating on this issue.


NOTE : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked assumed answered and would be moved to answered questions pool.

[Eli_Spaans]

Concerning the performance.
We do mailboxes and full store (adding up to 35 GB), which takes about 1.5 hour.
Thing is, we don't get more than about 220 MB/min on Mailbox backup.

Still you should then be able to complete 50GB in about 4 hours.
Try a Backup 2 Disk set.

Are you experiencing other network performance issues on this server?
Copy files to this server and find out what performance is for example.

[Robert_Duker]

OK an update: to date, our backups (both database & brick level) are now down to 8.5 hours. I had about 98% fragmentation on the hard drive. I also did some research and found that the large number of small messages (somewhere in the range 850,000) was part of the problem, since a large part of the slow-down of brick level backups is due to the number of mesages, not necessarily the size.

Result: I instituted a change in mail retension policy and now all emails are deleted after 180 days with each user having unlimited storage on the network Share for Archived .PST files. That immediately dropped my mail store down to 40Gb and should drop even further as time progresses.

My brick level backups have dramatically improved to 100mb/s or more (The full database backup takes less than 2 hours.)

I will not, ever; turn off Anti Virus protection during a backup. The increased risk is completely unacceptable and if any backup program requires it be turned off in order to function properly, it needs to replaced by a competitor's product who has taken the situation seriously enough to resolve that issue. Anyone who makes that suggestion has no grasp on the whole purpose behind network management or security. I did, hoever compromise and turned off scan when opened for backup, leaving the Anti virus running otherwise.

So, to recap, backups went from 13+ hours to under 9 hours and still dropping. speed is up, and brick level restores go off without a hitch every time.Message was edited by:
Robert Duker

[Robert_Duker]

OK, an update to the update:

I have completed an offline defrag /compression of the database and am now enjoying a rate of:

Backed up 698542 mail messages in 6327 folders in 112 mailbox(es)
Processed 56,590,354,214 bytes in 5 hours, 41 minutes, and 46 seconds.
Throughput rate: 158 MB/min

I believe I mentioned that we had pushed our users to archive old email data and reduced our database from over 65Gb to its present size. Defragging, although it took almost the entire night, was worth every minute of my time as now I have plenty of breathing room on my backup process.

I hope these notes help out, since I have found a lot of people having slowdown issues with brick level backups and Veritas support has never stuck with anyone to the end of the issue.

[Robert_Duker]

though a little helpfull, this problem was not resovled by Veritas, who refused to help me one-on-one even though I have a paid service contract with them.

This shows how truely worthless veritas support and their service contracts are.

This issue has been resolved thanks to the many suggestions made by other forum users posting their tips and lessons learned.