Exchange restores to different versions

[mconstant81]

We are looking to get a better understanding of doing restores for Exchange. Currently sometimes we get a request to restore very old databases or emails. With NetBackup you can only restore to an Exchange Server. Restoring to a location and using .tar is not support. How do companies handle different versions of Exchange? For example lets say we have a backup of Exchange 2010. We need to do a restore and the version we are on is Exchange 2016 CU5. Obviously the schema of the DB has changed a large amount. Does NetBackup understand this and do something to allow a restore or do we have to keep a copy of each version of Exchange we have used available to do a restore to so the database schemas match?

[Marianne]

You actually need to ask Microsoft.

Netbackup simply reads from backup storage and sends the data to the Destination Client.

It is up to Exchange on the Destination Client to accept and write the data to Exchange DB. 
If the new version does not 'understand' the data it is receiving, the restore will fail with an error from Exchange.

Having a good Archiving product such as Veritas Enterprise Vault solves this problem. 
It 'future proofs' the data due to the way that Exchange data is stored in the archives.

[Michael_G_Ander]

You need a thirdpart product to restore old exchange backups, some products can read the netbackup image if you install a netbackup client on the same machine as the product. This of course requires that the image is copied on to the machine.

Another more cumbersome solution is to install the relevant exchange server, restore the db and extract the needed mails.

If you have grt backups you might be able to restore old mails directly if the netbackup image is duplicated to a disk storage unit. As grt resembles the way exchange in general receive mails.

[Nicolai]

My 2 cent regarding the matter - bit grumpy old mand - I know 

Tool used wrong. Backup is for crash recovery, not for archiving. The problem describes here is exactly because backup is used for archiving. Anything long termed archived should be in a "general readable" format not bound by what vendor X now support.Furthermore restoring from backup after 10 to 15 years will be "needle in the haystack" because backup does record meta data (data about data) and there is no "indexing and free text search".

I know a lot of companies used backup for archiving, but it doesn improve the use case :)

Best Regards

Nicolai

[Michal_Mikulik1]

Hello,

try some Microsoft Exchange forum if MS supports this. If not, NetBackup cannot override.

If the support is not here, you must:

- keep the old Exchange version for possible restores

- or (better for future restores) use a data format more suitable for archiving purposes (PST file exports)

Regards

Michal