Discussion on:

Back up Exchange 2010 with this Windows Server 2008 R2 feature

On WS 2003, the built-in backup was pretty good. With WS 2008/R2, the backup leaves much to be desired. We've been EXTREMELY displeased with it. We've had all sorts of minor annoyances, and the final straw was when we tested recovery (yeah yeah, we put a plan into place without really testing recovery for a while...) we were absolutely dismayed. As a result, we just bought some Paragon licenses and we're in the middle of moving to that right now.

J.Ja

I have had a 100% susccess rate with Windows 2008 (R2) backups. Test the scenario's, try them out. Most people fall over 4 to 5 issues (mostly due to assumptions) and over some more complex scenario's but it does work and quite well and fast. Including bare metal recovery. only this week we restored a W2K8R2 server from a DELL PE510 to an older PE2950 with different raid controller etc. That worked just fine. I use it when and where approriate fully automated via simple scripting.

See also some posts on some of te most challenging P2V. I've done some complex recoveries / transitions with nothing more than that product and free tools. http://workinghardinit.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/stories-of-windows-backup-p2v-v2v-v2p/ But beware that most restores are a lot easier. Main complaint: backups to a network share consume a lot of space but a couple of TB is so cheap it's not show stopper.

That's what burned us, we thought we could do bare metal recovery... you can, but only when you allow the backup system to take over a disk. Which we can't do, because we need to expose the backup location so other systems can backup to it as well. That was the deal breaker. In some scenarios, it is still a good backup system (on my server at home, it more than meets my needs) but for our servers in the office, it no longer worked as well as the older version did.

J.Ja

Backing up never seems to be a big problem, why not talk about restoring a single item of a Exchange Mailbox .. that seems like mission impossible ..any ideas ?

Hello Scott, we have our backup setup as per your details and above and it has been working 100%. We unfortunately recently had trojan virus attach itself to our mail database log files and as such exchange mail database could not be mounted because the Anti Virus quarantined the log infected files. We proceeded to recover the database from a previous backup and this was succesful, but now Windows Server Backup backs up everything except the exhange application and its inherent database. Any possible ideas why this could be?

EDIT: I should just note that we are using the exact same settings that worked previously. It complains that the consistency check failed for the information store.

Hi,

are the logfiles also removed after backing up the MSX2010 DB? How about a brick level restore? I assume the latter is a enterprise feature and not available in WSB?

Cheers
Johannes

An archiving solution will keep your mind safe that it store all the emails found on the Exchange server and more. Then when disaster strikes you can easily restore the emails you desire. The main thing to note is that the Archive is up to date.

All of this can be achieved using GFI MailArchiver. It is one of the best and cheapest archiving solutions out there. GFI MailArchiver can help you to restore a mailbox easily in case of disaster recovery using the Mailbox Restore utility.

And while the exchange server is down one can easily continue working to access the emails by accessing them from the GFI MailArchiver web interface.

more on http://www.gfi.com/MailArchiver

Hi ,

I run exchange db backup on remote shared folder using windows server backup schedule mode. But time was passed 1hr , backup process can not start and only keep showing " running consistency check .... ". any possible error on my exchange server or remote shared folder that destination of backup exchange db.

Thanks ..