Exchange Backup Job Rate slowed right down suddenly one day

[johncassell]

Hi, I am using Symantec Backup Exec 12 on Windows Small Business Server 2003 and backing up our Exchange database.

Up to and including 25-Aug-2014 I was getting Job rate speeds of 1,600MB/Min and the backup was taking about 1hr 20 mins.

On 26-Aug-2014 the job rate dropped to 58MB/Min and the backup took 21Hrs.

It has been this way ever since. Our Exchange Database is on the servers D drive and I'm backing up to a folder on the D drive (So nothing is going across the network).

I've searched numerous articles about this but nothing is helping so I've come on here.

Hope someone has an idea? (Since I noticed this drop in speed I've installed all Backup Exec updates and Windows updates but no difference made)

One small thing I did notice when this change happened is that in the Job History the start date was in the format something like 25-Aug-2014 but then the next day the format was Tuesday, 26 August 2014)
 

Also, for comparison I copy and pasted a 1GB file from the D drive To the D drive and the speed was 700MB/s.

Thanks in advance
John

[Gurvinder]

if possible run a defrag of the drive where B2D exists and check if the speeds improve.

[johncassell]

Hi, yes a defrag (using windows defrag and defraggler) was done on this drive and nothing changed. For some reason in the last few days the backup has sneaked up from 68MB/Min to 140-160MB/Min

Confused!

Thanks

John

[CraigV]

...if you have an antivirus installed, make sure it isn't scanning the BE services...

Also make sure no Exchange maintenance tasks are running at the same time as the backup.

Thanks!

[johncassell]

Hi Craig, thanks for the reply. I performed a test of the backup while we had no anti-virus installed (during a change from AVG to Sophos) and speed was still slow. I'm happy to check that Sophos isn't scanning the BE Services but not sure how to do that (I have the ability to add exceptions for on-access scanning but do I just add the folder C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec ?

[CraigV]

These need to be excluded:

C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\beremote.exe
C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\beserver.exe
C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\bengine.exe
C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\benetns.exe 
C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\pvlsvr.exe
C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\BkUpexec.exe