tferro999 Posted December 14, 2006 Report Share Posted December 14, 2006 Hi, I've got a Dell Poweredge 2850 with Dual Xeon 3.0 CPUs, 2 Gb of RAM, and a RAID 5 disk array. This machine is running Windows Server 2003 and Exchange 2003. My Backup machines is a Dual Xeon 3.0, RAID 5 machines with 2 TB of storage. I have about 180 odd Exchange users and my mail store is about 23 Gb. When I use Retrospect 7.5 to backup the entire database, it takes about 40 minutes at around 1227.8 mb/min. Now here is the problem, when I backup the mailboxes individually so I can restore individual messages for my users, it takes about 12 - 16 hours at around 3 mb/min. I understand that the brick level mailbox backups will take longer than the full database backup, but this seems unbearably slow. My backups of the mailboxes used to take around 2 - 4 hours back when I had around 40-80 users. Retrospect Tech support told me that this is normal because as the catalog file grows and I backup these mailboxes nightly, it takes more and more time to compare the files, edit the catalog etc etc. I have my schedule set to backup these mailboxes nightly and then recycle the backup every month. Towards the end of the month, it took " 1 11:20:25" to backup the mailboxes. Does that extra 1 mean it took 1 day and 11 hours? After the recycle, it took "1 4:57:50" to backup the mailbox. I'm pretty green when it comes to using Retrospect, so I hope there is an easy answer to this. Does anyone have any advice on how to better schedule my exchange backups so I still have good coverage but also decent backup times. I need to store about 1-3 months of email backups for my users. I have about 1.5 TB to work with. Tony Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AmyJ Posted December 20, 2006 Report Share Posted December 20, 2006 Hi Tony - Mailbox backup is definitely a long slow process. If the Recycle Backup is saving you about 6 hours by the end of the month maybe it would be worthwhile to have more then one Mailboxes backup set that you cycle around so that any one set isn't getting as full. Let's say you had 4 mailbox backup sets - one for each week - that you rotated. None of them would ever grow as big as the set that was being used for the entire month, not to mention the added security of having more then one copy of the data. It would take up more space on your disks, but there has to be a balance somewhere between space and time. Have you considered archiving older data so that the users have less in their personal mailboxes? Thanks, Amy Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tferro999 Posted December 20, 2006 Author Report Share Posted December 20, 2006 Hi Amy, Thanks for the response. I'm going to try splitting my backup job into the 4 week schedule and see how it goes. Tony Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slacker17 Posted December 21, 2006 Report Share Posted December 21, 2006 hell, you've got 1.5 tb, that a little more than twice what i have (i don't have 100 people backing up mail of all things though) i'd agree with amy and make 4 backup sets or even 7 since you have the space. from my understanding, it's pretty hard to rack up a gig of mail per each user (without it being masses of junk-mail) i don't own a business though so i wouldn't know. i'm sure depending on teh business some of the emails are extremely important. but like amy said, if the mail is important, it would make sense to have four backup catalogs and imo, it would make it faster as well. also instead of rechecking backup set a after it backups d. i'd switch it to deleta a and recreate the whole thing. just my opinon though. also it sounds like your drives are mirrored. i'd sell my left leg to have a setup like you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted December 21, 2006 Report Share Posted December 21, 2006 Quote: it's pretty hard to rack up a gig of mail per each user (without it being masses of junk-mail) i don't own a business though so i wouldn't know. I didn't know so I took a look moments ago. This calendar year I have gotten 5.68 GB email, not counting junk. Maybe things are just different for attorneys. Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bazcurtis Posted December 22, 2006 Report Share Posted December 22, 2006 Hi, I had the exact same problem. It took 16 hours to backup 120 mailboxes at the same rate you were seeing. We used New Media set everyday so that didn't speed it up. I tried a file backup as an incremental and that was just as slow. What was interesting, if you actually watch each mailbox being backed up it took longer to open and close the mailbox than to actually do the files. I went back to using Exmerge for brick level backups. It takes 8 minutes to do the whole server as an incremental. Shame Exmerge has gone out of Exchange 2007!! Cheers Michael Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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