Exchange restores are much larger than expected

[user022013]

Hi gurus,

I have an issue restore Exchange Information Store and transaction logs.

Master/Media and client running 7.5.0.7 on Windows 2008 R2

Exchange is 2010 running on Windows2008 R2

I select the Full Exchange backup for the Information Store -  size is 361539480 kb (as reported in NetBackup BAR window)

I select multiple transaction log backups - total size is  3GB

I have a 600GB drive to restore the files to - dedicated to exchange restores and empty.

Restore continues to fail - Restore size reported in Activity Monitor is over 1TB.

Does anybody know why this is occurring?

Thank you.

[Possible]

Can u post the job details please ?

[Marianne]

Want to borrow my 2TB USB drive?  

In all seriousness - you will need logs to see what happened during the restore.
On media server - bptm and bpbrm
On Exchange server - tar

Windows Event log may also give you a clue as to what happened.

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

If you restore from multiplxed backups, the size counter is the GUI, is the data read from tape - including those fragment not needed for the restore because they belong to other streams. This is the cost of using multiplxed backups - it increases restore time.

You should able to trust the  image size reported by Netbackup.

[user022013]

Marianne,  thank you.  We are in the process of sourcing multiple usb drives to move our backup system onto  ;)

Nicolai, what do you know, they are multiplexed which means it's a completely different issue altogether.

I am currently trying a restore of another information store and will see if the same issue occurs.   I will post logs and job details when I have them.

[user022013]

Also goes to show you can't rely on information from some people.  The exchange server is 2007 running on Win2003 R2.  Don't know if this makes a difference.  Probably not.

We have had successful restores in the past.

[Nicolai]

You can see if a backup image is multiplexed by using the bpimagelist command and look for field 33.

1=multiplxed

0=non multiplxed

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH5584

it is not super user friendly because you need to know the bpimage command and some basic text manipulation tools. On UNIX those are direct available, but Windows is a bit more difficult.

TIP: Pass the output from bpimagelist to windows finstr command

bpimagelist -hoursago 24 | findstr IMAGE

[user022013]

Thanks everyone,  I just looked at the media status which tells me the media was multiplexed.  That answers that question.  The issue with the actual restore turned out to be a bad media.