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Granular restore for Exchange is not working.

ronr
Level 4

Hello,

I have a single Exchange 2007 SP3 server that is backed-up with SSR 2011.

A new recovery point set is created every Thursday, and an Incremental recovery point is created every night. I keep 4 recovery point sets, and let SSR manage my storage automatically. Altogether, the recovery point sets weigh ~400GB.

I'm trying to recover a few Email messages from the past two weeks. Recovery point sets are saved on an external hard drive which is connected to my Desktop - Windows 7 64Bit with Outlook installed, Core i5 and 4GB of RAM. I browsed to the mail server's folder on the external drive, and loaded its .sv2i file. That was 5 hours ago, and still - the GRO console shows "Loading recovery points..." while occasionally prompts for a password (sets are encrypted).

Is this problem caused because I'm creating a new recovery point set weakly, rather than monthly? How do you backup your Exchange?

If this is indeed a bug in the software, will a fix be released soon? We cannot afford to be unprotected!

10 REPLIES 10

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

Is this the issue you are seeing?

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH153610

I have a single Exchange 2007 SP3 server that is backed-up with SSR 2011.

SP3 is not currently listed on the SCL (http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH157280). I'm currently checking to see when this will be supported.

ronr
Level 4

I never got that far... my issue is that when I open the index file, GRO says "Loading recovery points...", but it never finishes loading them (well, I gave up after 5 hours, but maybe if I gave it the whole day...)

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

By way of a test, can you do a new independent (full only) backup without a password to see if this makes a difference?

ronr
Level 4

By the way, is there a debug log I can take a look at, and see what's going on?

Also, is it possible to generate an index file that will show only the last full backup and its incrementals? Since I'm not receiving any error message, I'm begining to think that maybe because I'm doing full backups weekly (instead of the default monthly), and keeping 4 full sets, it just takes GRO forever to go through all this GBs. Could this be the problem?

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

The debug logs are encrypted and can only been decrypted by Symantec support.

I think we'll know more once you have tried an independent backup without a password. It should make no difference as to when you do your full backups.

ronr
Level 4

I removed the password protection from the server's backup job, and created a full backup. It took GRO almost 15 minutes to load the file and mount the databases, but indeed it works - I was able to restore single objects from users' mailboxes.

I will wait for a few days, let SSR create incrementals for this recovery point base, then try again - to be on the safe side.

Untill Symantec resolves this issue, I will use BitLocker on my external, off-site hard-drives (unless someone has a better idea...).

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

Thanks for the update.

Untill Symantec resolves this issue, I will use BitLocker on my external, off-site hard-drives (unless someone has a better idea...).

We cannot resolve this until we know exactly what the issue is.

The next step is to create another new full backup with password protection to see what results this gives you.

ronr
Level 4

Over the weekend, two incremental backups were created - also, password-free.

Now, when I load the mail server's index file - GRO mounts the drives (accessible via Windows Explorer), but that's it - it has been 'Mounting Volumes' (lower left corner in the GRO console) for almost two hours now, with no progress. I wish there was a trace log I could look at to see where and why it's stuck, but there's none, to my knowledge.

Any ideas?

criley
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited

I think you have reached a point where you need to contact support so that we can analyze the logs to see what is going on here.

Dennis_Bos
Level 3

 

I started a same case a year ago https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/granular-restore-password-not-valid

The workaround as mentioned doesn't work for us.

I tried to open a support case (mysupport) to get the fix (see at the bottom of TECH128501). After putting in the full case a couple of times, we keep getting errors (with IE9 and Chrome). I give up, it cost too much time. How can I get the fix, so we can test this in a testenvironment?