EV Backup & Recovery

[beckeym]

We rolled out EV 10.0.1.1171 for Exchange 2007 to production in May 2013 and have been struggling with what our backup and restore policy should be for the system.  We are running full backups for the system once a week and we are doing incremental backups every night.  I have read posts that it is a challenge to restore items for a client’s archive that they may have deleted or have been expired in the system.

I was wondering what other administrator’s are doing in their environments?

[AndrewB]

what are your RPO and RTO objectives?

"I have read posts that it is a challenge to restore items for a client’s archive that they may have deleted or have been expired in the system" - if you're talking about single archive recovery then yes it's a challenge because you have to restore the entire environment to export the archive then import it back to your production system. if you're talking about deleted item recovery, that's a setting you can modify as you see fit. the only caveat is that you have to recover all the deleted items and cant choose one by one.

[beckeym]

Our RTO and RPO haven't been really set yet and we are trying to get them defined. Right now all we have been tasked with is making sure that the system is recoverable in event of a DR.

[Pradeep-Papnai]

Deleted items can be recover if administrator have enable "Enable recovery of user deleted items" from EV site settings. Deleted items would remain in archive's dumpster till the no of days you have specified in site setting. These deleted items can be recover from  the 'properties' of the appropriate "archive" and "Recover Items" on the "Deleted Items" tab.

Please check one of other forum created by Rob

http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/recovering-deleted-items   

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH59950

If the items are expired completely and beyond the time specified in site settings, then you need to recover via DR mechanism, same as mention in http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH48829 for archive.

http://www.symantec.com/connect/forums/restoring-email-deleted-enterprise-vault-archive-backup-exec

[GabeV]

The Enterprise Vault 10.0.1 Administrator's Guide has the step-by-step process to recover Enterprise Vault from backups:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/DOC5450 (Page 383)

You have two methods to recover Enterprise Vault:

* Recovering Enterprise Vault using full system backups
* Recovering Enterprise Vault using data-only backups

When you take a full backup of Enterprise Vault, you need: Storage (archived data), index locations and SQL Server databases. For storage and indexes you can use any backup solution. For SQL Server and regular maintenance, you can follow this TN:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH74666

I have seen administrators that take an incremental backup nightly and a full backup weekly. It depends of what capacity and requirements your organization has. I have seen storage devices where customer host all EV data in there. Then, they take snapshots really fast. However, like AndrewB mentioned, if you want to recover a single archive, you need to install a separate Enterprise Vault environment.

I hope this helps!!

[MichelZ]

Also, you could replicate your data instead of backing it up, for an even better RTO/RPO using our EVNearSync product:

http://www.quadrotech-it.com/products/evnearsync/