• NTBackup question

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    #464436

    Hello everyone. I have a friend who has a small business. He runs Windows SBS 2003 and Exchange Server 2003. He’s using NTBackup to backup his data and e-mail server information stores and logs. He has a full backup running weekly and incremental backups running the other six days of the week. He backs up to USB hard drives.

    I was looking through the backup information and the event viewer and everything appears to be fine. There are no error messages, nothing in Event Viewer to indicate any problems with the backups, etc. However, when I go into NTBackup and look at what’s available in the Restore and Manage Media tab I’m finding that the Exchange stuff doesn’t appear to be backed up.

    Looking at the full backup it does show the information store, and when I expand it I see Log Files, Mailbox Store and Public Folder Store. The problem is that they’re all empty. When I click on each one all I see in the right window pane where the data should be visible is No entries found.

    Obviously this is extremely bizarre because, as I said, there are no errors from the backup jobs running. Event Viewer says everything is working fine and the reports that I can view in NTBackup say the same thing. It’s very bizarre.

    Any ideas?

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    • #1188752

      Our idea has been to make NTBackup about an order of magnitude easier to use by running BackupAssist as NT Backup’s front and back-end. There is an Exchange Mailbox backup add-on module which backs up mailboxes to standard PST files. We have it on two Windows Server 2003 32-bit servers, one ‘ordinary running Exchange Server 2003, and the second running R2, mainly as a Terminal Server.

      I have been immensely impressed by their technical support when it’s been needed – and there are very few companies you can say that about! As a charity, we get it even cheaper than the not-very-expensive price to ordinary businesses. (Compare, for example, BackupExec, which costs £gasp!)

      BATcher

      Plethora means a lot to me.

    • #1188773

      Do you backup the System State in the same backup job? When the Exchange databases reside on the system drive, the Exchange Server 2003 storage group is frozen during the System State backup operation, and NTBackup won’t be able to continue the Exchange backup. I’d expect some errors to show up in the event logs, though…

      • #1188832

        Do you backup the System State in the same backup job? When the Exchange databases reside on the system drive, the Exchange Server 2003 storage group is frozen during the System State backup operation, and NTBackup won’t be able to continue the Exchange backup. I’d expect some errors to show up in the event logs, though…

        I’ll have to check, but I agree about the fact that there are no error messages in Event Viewer. I’ll check it out and let you know.

      • #1189455

        Do you backup the System State in the same backup job? When the Exchange databases reside on the system drive, the Exchange Server 2003 storage group is frozen during the System State backup operation, and NTBackup won’t be able to continue the Exchange backup. I’d expect some errors to show up in the event logs, though…

        Nope, system state is not set to be backed up.

    • #1188780

      Yes to your question, and no problem results. They’ve been doing this for several years, so I imagine they’ve got round any snags there might have been!

      BATcher

      Plethora means a lot to me.

    • #1189333

      Have you tried restoring the mailbox store to the RSG? This should tell you if it’s working.

      cheers, Paul

      • #1189456

        Have you tried restoring the mailbox store to the RSG? This should tell you if it’s working.

        cheers, Paul

        No. Is that how you restore using Exchange 2003 and NTBackup? I’ll look into it and get back to you.

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