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Backing up MS Exchange 2003 - Real world solutions from the trenches

As an in house IT admin or if you're lucky or unlucky enough to live in the world of outsourced IT Support providers (like myself) you face a constant balancing act against budget v's the powers that be demanding quick recovery when the inevitable happens and something goes wrong. All those conversations that you have had trying to justify clustering your messaging system or having a warm spare server ready in case the Exchange server dies are forgotten when the Server Goes bang at 10am in the morning and the MD or Sales people are waiting for critical emails inbound or outbound. It's at this point that the Savvy IT professional and or contractor will have within easy reach a copy of all those emails and memos asking for budget to make recovery quicker. Now its fair to say that some of the problems with restoring Exchange quickly have been tackled my Microsoft within Exchange 2007, database portability, LCR even in Exchange Standard edition are all great, this however is no good if your still stuck with Exchange 2003.

 

When your users or bosses are informed that the messaging system will be down for at the least the day and you're going to have to work through the night a common response will be, "can't you just shove the tape in and restore?" or more often they forget that the last time this was discussed, it was decided that the "world wouldnt end if we dont have email for a few days". How do you handle and plan for the day that the shiny Dual CPU Rack mounted Exchange server looks like it has a faulty motherboard, the parts are not easily available, the only spare machine in your possession is a P4 2.8Ghz that you have used for a bit of virtualisation practise?

It starts to dawn on you that your mailbox level tape based backup that allows you to restore individual emails if needed from one of the leading providers could be next to useless, particularly if like most of us you have tried to keep up with tape drives as new technology comes out, meaning that the DLT tape that was in your exchange server won't fit in your new LTO drive backing up your database and file servers. In short you have a problem; one which unless your very lucky could see you burning the midnight oil and praying that the part you have just ordered will fix the server.

Looking at the opposite issue, you employ a backup strategy of imaging servers every night to disk, it doesn't matter if the server goes up in smoke as you can simply bare metal restore from the last backup onto a completely different machine, a little bit of messing about in device manager and you will be up and running in no time. However, in this instance your boss come to you wanting an email recovering that he sent 6 months ago and he deleted by mistake about 3 months ago because you're always hassling about keeping mailboxes small.

This scenario presents another problem in that you have only been allowed to purchase enough storage space to hold images for a month, another tirade ensues as your boss realises the email is gone forever.

If either of the above sound familiar you have my deepest sympathies, fortunately or unfortunately (depending on how you view it) we manage and provide support in excess of a 100 networks on behalf of our clients, some as small as 4 or 5 PC’s and at largest in excess of 2000. Given that our exposure to Disaster Scenarios is more frequent than an average in house admin. We are it seems faced with challenges like the above on a month by month basis, so what’s the answer?

Do you rely on tape so you can have monthly archive backups and rely on the software vendors claim of “bare metal” restore or go the opposite way and look at full disk imaging, as a rule relying on a single solution there is always a compromise to be made. From direct experience the best solution budget permitting has always been a combination of the two, expensive yes but in the absence of clustering or a substantial virtualised environment you need to be able to deal with both of the above scenarios in as quick a way as possible.

How to achieve this?

A simple answer would be Veritas backup exec and tape for mailbox level restore and longer term archiving and something like Acronis for your imaging and bare metal probably out to a NAS box of some description. Yes backup Exec does have an intelligent disaster recovery option but in my direct experience its ability to bare metal restore back to different hardware is nowhere near as good as Acronis. In addition to this the above method utilises tape and whilst this creates a nice warm familiar feeling for some, for others it creates a feeling of dread when you pull an archive tape out of the safe that you haven’t seen for 6 months, let alone done any test restores.

This method combining Veritas and Acronis works, could we do the same using purely Symantec products? Yes you can, does it cost more for very little if any benefit? Absolutely; Acronis does what it says on the tin and in the absence of anything better is a good way of insuring you have both ways covered.

We have perhaps found a better solution, Sonicwall CDP this is a network appliance that offers mailbox level backup every 15 minutes if you so choose and also bare metal of your servers. These appliances have been around for a little while now and we are just embarking on a full testing program. As soon as I have some solid stats and findings I will update this article and probably post more detail in a separate document.

Please note that these are my personal ramblings, no doubt people have their own methods and many of them may be better, any and all feedback on any “stuff I post” is welcome there’s always someone out with their with more knowledge than yourself. Email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with any and all comments.

Paul aka Olly