Is it possible to backup Exchange with 2 separate Backup Exec Systems?

[BlueEchoes]

Just kicking around some ideas:

We have a HUGE Exchange system. 260gb in Public Folders, 270gb in mailboxes. We do GRT B2D. Due to drive space, budget, etc... we can only do fulls once a month and daily incrementals. If we had a disaster where Exchange went down, we would have some serious work to restore the data back, especially late in the month.

So we are looking at many other options. Some make sense, some are out there in to crazy talk land.

One crazy option is this and I was wondering if it was possible:

Keep backing up out Exchange in the same way, incrementals and full on our system. We have licensing for 2 other Backup Exec servers with the Exchange agent just sitting around doing nothing due to downsizing. Can we use these 2 backup systems somehow to back up Exchange more effeciently? Can we take one of those and back up the same Exchange system and due a full every other day onto a cheap external drive then overwrite every time? It will remove the transaction logs, so the regular backup would be messed up, so is there a way to do an old non-GRT way of backing up Exchange were it just gets the EDB's and STM files? Can you have 2 different systems doing backups to the same Exchange system? Even crazier, we have an older version of Comvault Galaxy that we have to maintain, could we implement that into this crazy scheme?

I did a google search and could not come up with anything about 2 different systems backing up the same Exchange system. So I turn to posting.

Hope all of you have a fantastic Holiday!

[CraigV]

Hi there,

It SHOULD be possible, but why not simply connect the external drive to your current BEWS server, and create a job that runs every other day.
If you want to go with your suggestion above, I'd do the following:

1. Backup to external drive
Load up BEWS and the Exchange agent on another spare server, and add that Exchange server into a selection list, before creating a backup job to run according to your schedule. Once done, create a B2D folder for that drive, and keep the usual default selections. However, change your overwrite protection period to 1 day. What this will do is protect your data for 24 hours before allowing it to be overwritten.
When your job runs, it backups Exchange and clears your logs. It then retains that data for 1 day, before allowing it to be overwritten.

2. Commvault Galaxy
I have no idea on this.

What you need to do is make sure both systems are not backing up Exchange at the same time so as to prevent issues.

Laters!

[teiva-boy]

 The best suggestion for you is to dedupe your Exchange backups.  This will be a feature in Late Jan when BE2010 comes out.
This will allow you to retain more full backups to disk in the same amount of space as a single full.

If you are on current maintenance you will be entitled to this upgrade, with only having to add on the dedupe license, what that will cost???

Additionally to augment your backups, I would look into BackupExec System Recovery (which now includes the Exchange GRO for free, and overall is cheaper than the previous version)  Backup your Exchange or complete server to a NAS, USB HDD, or DAS.  Have it write to this disk and keep at least 3 versions of the backup.  This will give you complete server recovery in case of a disaster.  It's meant to augment BackupExec's data recovery features.  GRO and GRT are redundant but they differ in functionality...

#2, BE is far superior to Commvault in most things short of NDMP features.  Other than that, there is no GRT functions, no scriptless VMware backups, and their archiving implementation is very poor and half baked.  It sure has a pretty interface though.