How long is restore going to take?

[Shadow1psc]

I'm going to try to make this as short as possible -

I had an Exchange 2010 database go down after a power outtage (and eseutil couldn't get it back to a clean state), so I decided to restore from our backup. Last full backup was over the weekend, plus a differential from Monday and Tuesday night. All together the total backup was 430gb or so. The job has been running for 3 hours and 15 minutes, is at a 468gb byte count (and growing at a rate of 2.3gb per mintue or so) and I'm wondering if there's some way to tell how much longer the process will take?

I have everyone on a 'dialtone' mailbox as a temporary workaround, and am restoring the backup directly to the original database, rather than creating a recovery database. Should I have gone the recovery database route? I read somewhere else here in the discussions that you can restore a production database directly to itself if the server is fine (I made sure there are no disk errors, and its on a RAID 1+0 config).

Any help much appreciated.

[Shadow1psc]

Byte count has stopped moving at 492gb, but the job rate is still fluctuating...

-edit-

Job rate is literally going down 1mb every few seconds and not doing anything else...

[pkh · Accepted solution]

There is no way to tell how long the restore will take. If you are restoring from tape then the backup sets need to be staged to disk before the restore can start

[Shadow1psc]

I ended up canceling that backup and am now trying to restore it (correctly, one full backup, one latest differential) to a recovery database instead because trying to restore mailboxes in place was causing outlook invites from old items to be re-sent both internally and externally (which is a nightmare).

If I get the restoration done correctly to the recovery database, will merging or moving mail items from it to the newly created database cause the same issue? Sorry that that is a different question, I can make a new thread for it if need be.