Hung Backup Job Affects Exchange Circular Logging

[Bob_Smith_6]

I'm not sure if anyone else has seen this but I figured I'd put it out there in case anyone else is experiencing the same thing.

When circular logging is enabled in Exchange 2010 and there is a backup job that is hung (mine was sitting at a 'Loading Media' status but never timed out), Exchange logs are not committed and flushed.  I noticed that despite having circular logging enabled on the Exchange database the log directory grew overnight to around 11,000 log files. After canceling the hung backup job the logs were immediately flushed from the log directory.

I'm unaware if this is a bug in Exchange or Backup Exec or if this is working the way it was designed, but it caused me a lot of headaches until I figured out that the backup job, not an Exchange issue, was causing the logs to persist.

Software specs:

Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard

Exchange 2010 Service Pack 1

Backup Exec 2010 R2

[Colin_Weaver]

Out of interest, as Backup Exec will truncate the Exchange logs why are you using circular logging?

BTW I suspect reason for the problem is that Exchnage is out into Backup mode and a VSS snapshot request is made and if the BE job never finishes the snap is never undone and Exchnage therefore remians in backup mode - my guess (but you would have to check with Mircosoft) is that the activities of Circular logging truncating logs is suspended until no snapshot/backup mode is enabled.