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Exchange Backups

Thread needs solution

Good Morning,

  We are migrating from Backup Exec to Acronis backup and Recovery 11.7 and I have some questions and need some help.  File backups are up and running and running as expected so no issues there, it is exchange backups.  

  The backups take 18 hours for a 800GB across 4 mailstores and that is crazy long to me and we can only run one job at a time to the exchange sserver.  Using BE we could have back ups running to two mailstores on a single exchange at once and easily meet our time objectives and that was to tape.  Now we are backing up to disk across a single 1GB NIC and it takes twice as long.  Why?

  Environment as follows:  Exchange 2016 CU1, VMware 5.5 on HP Blade Center running BL-460G8, Storage is a Compellent SC30 connected via fiber channel.  Acronis is running on a Stonefly appliance.  backup options are default except Exchange Metadata include mailboxes and folders.

 

TIA,

Jim

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Hi

Please, switch Exchange Metadata collection to include only mailboxes. It should increase backup speed.

Can you export backup plan to xml and attach to this thread?

 

  Plan is attached, had to change it to a zip file.    We would really like to get down to the email level if possible.  It allows for single item recovery quickly.  Restore and entire information store, then attaching to it, then exporting the whhole mailbox, to find one calendar items seems a bit of a long process.  Or is there another way?  Also can we run two jobs and one time to our exchange server like we did with Backup Exec?

 

TIA,

Jim

Attachment Size
371165-131044.zip 5.05 KB

I see that you are using vault at storage node. Do you enable deduplication on that vault?

I recommend to you to use simple network share instead of storage node, because you create full backups weekly - thus, no benefits from storage node.

Regarding single item recovery: to recover single item from database-level backup there is no need to recover entire database. You can drill down into database content and recover single item. The drawback that database browsing will be slower because of absence of metadata. But this is better than 18 hours backup, right?

If you want to continue use storage node, then follow instructions in this knowledge base article - https://kb.acronis.com/content/33029

Also, you can try Acronis Backup 12 Beta. Exchange backup in v12 should be faster. http://www.acronis.com/en-us/promo/acronis-backup-12-beta/

 

  Made teh change to mailboxes only and will see how browsing is tomorrow.  Dedupe is being handled by Acronis after backups.  The reason we are using the storage node is because we replicate between the Stonefly Appliances to an offsite location.  We will probably wait on v12 until a bit later as we just transitioned form Backup Exec to Acronis this years and are still woring out all the issues created by the migration.  We have file down and working well its excchange that is causing us a lot of pain.  Also can we run two jobs and one time to our exchange server like we did with Backup Exec?

 

TIA,

 

Jim

We don't support two Exchange backup jobs running simultaneously. Why do you need this? Your bottlenecks will be either network speed or HDD read speed. Running 2 jobs in parallel will not improve the situation until each database is placed on its own HDD.

 

  Basically tiem to back up 800GB of mail and public folders.  Hopefully switching to metadata for mailboxes only will help with speed.  Will let you know in the AM

TIA,

Jim

  I wanted to let you know backups ran a bit faster.  There are four total jobs and it looks like we cut about 4 total hur off backup times, so not to bad.  Thanks.  Now you mentioned that if we want to run two jobs simutaniously we would need another disk, is that right?  Since we are using a storage pool right now to support replication we would need two storage pools to support multiple jobs running at once to meet our backup window.  IS that correct?

 

TIA,

Jim

  Was checking around and found this link http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/updates/changes.html?p=31696 whre is says

  • Agent for Exchange can back up and recover Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 databases. Backup and recovery of Exchange 2016 mailboxes (including mailbox recovery from database backups) are not supported.

 

  Is this correct?

 

TIA,

Jim

Jim Raykowski wrote:

  Was checking around and found this link http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/updates/changes.html?p=31696 whre is says

  • Agent for Exchange can back up and recover Microsoft Exchange Server 2016 databases. Backup and recovery of Exchange 2016 mailboxes (including mailbox recovery from database backups) are not supported.

 

  Is this correct?

 

TIA,

Jim

Officially we don't claim granular mailbox recovery from Exchange Server 2016 database backups, because  we have some issues during recovery in some specific cases.

By the way, why do you have 4 backup jobs instead of one? As I mentioned before, we don't support simultaneous backup of Exchange databases (running several backup jobs at a time).

 

Also, what is your backup window?

  Doyou think GRT will be available anytime in the future?  There are 4 jobs to support our backup window of 3pm to 6am.  When we run all the jobs together it takes 18hours.

Jim

 

Granular recovery for Exchange Server 2016 database backup will be available in Acronis Backup 12.