Time Concern

[Frank_White]

Why does my Exchange Backup (Full) take 10-13 hours?  Is this normal for it to take this long?  My exchange backup is 107GB in size.  I can't run any other backups during the night because this backup consumes resources and take 13 hours to complete.  What can I do to minimize the time it takes?  It is backing up to tape.

[Hywel_Mallett]

It sounds a bit long...

What sort of tape drive do you have? What backup and verify speed is reported in the job log?

Are you using GRT for the backup?

Without GRT and backing up to LTO2, I would expect around 2-3 GB/min backup speed.

[Frank_White]

Exabyte VXA 3 SCSI Sequential Device

GRT is Enabled and Perform VSS Consistency Check is Enabled

Backup Speed is between 630MB - 660MB

Verify After backup is not Selected

Sometimes (very rarely, maybe once) the backup job will take 2:30 hrs but most of the time it takes between 10-13hrs.

[Hywel_Mallett]

I would try doing a backup without GRT and the VSS consistency, just to see if that makes a large difference.

If it doesn't then is it possible you could watch the backup process as it happens? Exchange jobs have a pre-processing state before the actual backup starts, and sometimes this can take a while. I wonder if that's the case for you, and it's taking abnormally long.

[Frank_White]

Unfortunately it runs at 12am....I do know that sometimes the pre-processing scan is just stuck there and I will have to cancel it in the morning.  The problem is that I can't run any other jobs because I don't know how long Exchange will take.  I appreciate your help.

[Frank_White]

Ran the backup last night and it took 6 hrs without GRT and VSS C.C.  The night before it took 2:30 hrs with them enabled.  I guess I just dont understand why there is so much inconsistency.  I also noticed that my exchange maintenance window was the same time as the backup so I switched to the weekend.  Any other thoughts?  Once again thanks for your help.

[Manu_Narayan]

That sounds about inline with how much mine took and how big my DB was.

My Exchange DB was about 180GB and was taking 22ish hours.

I did a massive restructure of the Exchange arcitecture to multiple SG and databases and a full backup takes about 6 hours now.