Exchange Mailbox Backup Soooooooooo Slowwwwwwwwwww

[PATRICK_Kitchen]

2 x Exchange 2003 SP2 Servers 200GB Data - Netbackup 5.0 MP6 Exchange Mailbox Agent

When trying to do a full mailbox backup using the eXchange mailbox ad in it goes forever - gave up after 24hours when it had only backed up about 50GB - surely it must be quicker than this.

Anyone any recommendations

Many thanks

Pat

[ahlip]

Hi Patrick,

Are you using MAPI to backup individual mailboxes? That approach is traditionally very slow - typically you only backup the VIP or a small subset of mailboxes.

Try just backing up Information Store, if it goes normal speed, then the bottleneck is at MAPI - exchange level.

[Jim_Miller]

I would not bother with mailbox backups as they are known to be slow. In my case, the info stores acroos 3 servers are about 1.5 TB.

Look into the folllowing 2 things

Ex 2003 Recovery storage groups. (To use these you would need enough free disk space to restore your largest storage group) http://hellomate.typepad.com/exchange/2003/12/the_recovery_st.html

Ex 2003 Retention of deleted items (My servers set to 21 days) In my 5 years I have never had to recover an individual mailbox.   Pay attention to the client side setting for "dumpsteralwayson" required for recovery outside of the deleted items folder. http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/MF022.html

[Colin_North]

I agree with Jim Miller. We backup the Exchange storage groups \\SSG1, \\SSG2 etc. And if a recovert is needed then use RSG (recovery storage group). Much faster than mailbox backups.