A solution for Exchange backup and restore
Friday, June 29th, 2007http://www.ontrackpowercontrols.com/
Some of you who are forced to deal with MS Exchange might want to take a look at this. For about $1,000 retail, the basic version of Ontrack’s “Power Controls” software is the best investment you could ever make.
I ran into the point this week where my Exchange “Brick Level” backs were taking more than a day to complete. So the long and the short of it the next backup was ready to start before the prior one finished.
Going to TimeFinder/SNAP based backups was always the plan, but this little fiasco today accelerated that project. But what I needed was to be able to do a mailbox or item-level restore.
OnTrack PowerControls does just that. You can open the .EDB file directly and extract whatever you need out of it. Search by name or subject or just select an entire mailbox and either drag it directly to your production exchange server or into a .PST file that the software will create for you just for this purpose.
Amazing stuff. The other peice you get using the full EDB file instead of the Veritas Exchange client backup is you get everything in the deleted items folder as well, and if you’ve set retention for 30 days or so, it means that you get it even if the user has emptied the deleted items in religiously. (Somehow I always end up cleaning up after the disgruntled employee who feels it necessary to dump everything he’s got to make life miserable on the people he’s abandoning)
And now, instead of having to rely on the MAPI connection into the exchange server for my backups, I just SNAP the volumes off, back-up the flat files, and I’m good to go. I’ve got enough to re-create the server *AND* do a single-item restore in one backup.
And our SNAP based backups run, literally 1,000 times faster than the old fashioned way of doing it.