MS Exchange Blog

Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide

Microsoft has released the Exchange Server 2003 Disaster Recovery Operations Guide.

Overview:
This guide explains how to back up and restore the critical data in your Exchange organization. It covers how to use the backup utility in Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Backup), how to back up Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, and how to restore Exchange Server 2003. This guide explains how to perform backup and restore procedures so that you can prepare for (back up) and recover from (restore) a failure that causes some or all of your data to become unavailable. This guide is intended for information technology (IT) professionals who perform backup and restore procedures or who write customized backup and restore procedures for their organization.

Recovery Storage Group Whitepaper

Another whitepaper is now available from Microsoft.

Using Exchange 2003 Recovery Storage Groups

Disaster Recovery Guides

Jim Holmgren, a Senior Network Engineer with Advertising.com, has kindly allowed me to put a link on this blog to a couple of informative disaster recovery documents that he has produced.

A while ago, Jim created a document for recovering an Exchange 5.5 server using Backup Exec. This document can be found here.

He has recently put together the same type of document for using the Recovery Storage Group feature of Exchange 2003 and explains how to recover mail messages with Backup Exec v9.0. This document can be found here.

Of course, use of these documents is entirely at your own risk and no responsibility can be made for the accuracy contained within them. They should be read in conjunction with the relevant Microsoft disaster recovery document:

Exchange 2000 Disaster Recovery

Exchange 5.5 Disaster Recovery

According to the Exchange 2003 Technical Library, the Exchange 2003 Disaster Recovery guide will be available in March 2004.

Backup Exec Hotfix

If you're using Backup Exec v9 (rev 4454) you'll need to install this hotfix if you want to backup an Exchange 2003 server.

Backup Exec Instructions...

Following on from last week's Arcserve disaster recovery instructions that I posted here, this week it's Backup Exec's turn. These instructions should enable you to recover an Exchange 5.5 server using a Backup Exec v8.6 online backup, with a recovery server.

Most of my experience is with Arcserve, so I was keen to 'have a go' with Backup Exec last week, and I have to say I was impressed with the experience, not least because the restore with BE took about 50% less time that the similarly sized Arcserve restore, using the same hardware. The BE restore took 33 mins for around 12GB of data... quite impressive...

The Veritas online documentation (10MB pdf!) is also streets ahead of CA's. When I first had to create instructions for Arcserve last year, I very much had to gather together information from various sources in an effort to work out the precise sequence of events, it seems that Veritas have done all that for you, which is just great.

If anyone out there has DR instructions that they have created for Exchange 2000, or for 5.5 with Arcserve and Backup Exec versions 9, please send them in if you feel generous enough to share them with other folks, and I'll post them here...

Chris Meirick

Help!...

Ok, so what do you do if disaster has struck, and your information store has corrupted or hardware failure has killed your 5.5 server? Well, you can perhaps go down the pub, or more likely do a restore. This document should help with recovering your Exchange server using an Arcserve online backup to a recovery server.

Chris Meirick

Disaster Recovery...

I've been doing some badly needed 5.5 disaster recovery testing over the past couple of days. It's gone surprisingly well so far... successful online restores using Arcserve 2000 and Backup Exec v8.6 have been accomplished. I've taken some pretty comprehensive notes, which I'll post here over the next couple of days, just as soon as they've been typed-up, and I'm happy that I could hand them over to my mother to follow.

I'll be doing some offline restores tomorrow, and also hope to play around with Ontrack's great PowerControls application, which can extract data from an unmounted .edb.

Chris Meirick

and Arcserve?...

According to CA..."Exchange 2003 is supported with ARCserve 9.0.1 build 2020 and above."

It looks like most companies are getting their act together, and making sure that their products are E2K3 compatible.

Chris Meirick

Arcserve...

What backup application do you use to backup your Exchange Server? A fair number of you will no doubt be using Computer Associates Arcserve product. Is it good or bad? Hey, you know the answer to that one. Chances are however that you have 'got' to use it... after all it cost the company a few bob, didn't it?

If you're backing-up the Exchange server, either locally or across the network, using the Arcserve Exchange Agent, there are couple of log files on the Exchange server that the Agent writes to, they're called dbaexch.log (logs normal agent activity) and dbaxchg2.log (logs brick level backup activity) and they can grow!... If the files have grown significantly overnight, check your backup job for errors.

So, be warned, keep an eye on these files, you don't want them filling up a disk...