Individual Mailbox restore staging entire Information Store

[mex-kshaw]

Hi all,

We have a Backup Exec 2012 server running alongside Exchange 2010.  Both are fully patched.  We backup to LTO3 Tape using an external Quantum Tape Drive.  

We are in the process of migrating from Exchange 2003 to 2010 and as part of the process we are testing backup and restoration of individual mailboxes as well as the entire IS.  

Upon attempting a restore of a Mailbox (~60MB) made using a GRT Backup we noticed the staging process was increasing to a huge amount (We eventually stopped it at 5GB) and came to the conclusion that BEX was staging our entire IS.  Now at the moment this is bad enough as our 2010 IS weighs in at 100GB plus a 10GB Catalog; however we have yet to finsih migration and our 2003 IS comes in at 400GB and so to have to stage 400GB+ of data just to recover a Mailbox which may be under 1GB in size.  

What options do we have to speed up this process?

All input appreciated, if I have missed any critical info please let me know.  

Kind regards,

Karl

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi Karl,

When doing a GRT backup of Exchange to tape, it will always stage to disk (default: C:\Temp). No way around this unless you backup-to-disk first. It would fail unless you had enough free space as your Information Store is big in the default location. You get around this by moving the temporary staging location to another drive...

You can try manually duplicating to disk first and then doing the restore. At least the Information Store will be on disk already.

Read my article below on how to do this:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/restoring-exchange-or-individual-mailboxesitems-using-backup-exec-howto

Thanks!