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JimTrouble 
15 pts. | Jan 3 2007 10:38AM GMT
Looking at it that way it isnt the end of the world should be lose a few hrs worth of emails. I think ill leave the backup solution as it is at the moment!
Thanks for your reply!
PDMeat 0 pts. | Jan 3 2007 11:08AM GMT
Good question.
It’s a long conversation and there are a lot of good articles on the subject of SLAs for recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives (RTO and RPO) but to answer your question, I would recommend:
1) Consider clustering Exchange. It’s been around for a long time and I’ve worked on Exchange since 5.x and the most likely reasons you’ll lose email service are related to the server hardware, OS and 3rd party apps like antivirus, antispam and disclaimers installed to the server that malfunction. These risks can be mitigated by using clustering. It’s not cheap, nor is it 100% perfect but it’s handy and has proven itself over the years to myself and many others.
If you use RAID disks it’s unlikely you’ll ever lose the database. Most servers will allow you to pull the database raid set and pop it into another (exchange) server and bring the raid set right up to access the data. Clustering does this of course in about 15 seconds with no user interaction required. Clusters are nice for rolling upgrades, etc. Very easy to test/roll back without breaking production.
2) If you absolutely cannot sleep because of the thought of losing an exchange database and losing data after a full backup, you’ll need a way to either replicate the exchange database and logs in realtime to another server with software like XOSoft, a SAN or specific disk-sync product or you will have to perform database snapshots and keep copying the transaction logs somehow. When you go to recover, you can either mount a snapshot copy of the database and choose to replay some/all/none of the logs or choose to recover a realtime sync’d secondary database and logs such as via SAN, xosoft, etc. Exchange 2007 also has log shipping that may help alleviate local server failures and there are many other products like Nerverfail that claim to do the same.
Personally unless your company has a large budget they are willing to spend to ensure exchange uptime to this level, I wouldn’t sweat it too much. Exchange database failure by itself is extremely rare and as noted above, if you have another exchange server handy it’s pretty easy just to move the RAID set with the database to another server and just mount the DB and you’re up and running again after reconnecting the mailboxes.
It’s also a good idea to move anti-spam, content scanning and disclaimer funtions to a gateway/bridgehead server, not run on exchange. Trend Micro IMSS and Clearswift Mailsweeper, etc are examples.
jimk0157 0 pts. | Jan 4 2007 8:25AM GMT
You may want to upgrade to Backup Exec 11d. It has a much improved exchange agent which permits continuous backup of your exchange info store (basically it continuously saves transactions to the exchange log file). With this new feature you can restore to any point in time. With 11d you can also restore individual mailboxes (or messages) from the info store backup.
JimTrouble 15 pts. | Jan 4 2007 9:04AM GMT
I will be upgrading to BE 11d over the next weeks coincidentally! Thanks again for all replies on this topic!
Happy new year
danm66 0 pts. | Jan 4 2007 12:04PM GMT
Another thing to keep in mind is that any users using Outlook with cached mode enabled, will have copies of the “lost” emails as long as they were online and running Outlook on the day the server goes down. Of course, if they left early in the day, then they will lose those emails that came in after they disconnected.
If you are working on a DR plan, you might want to investigate what will happen to incoming emails while the server is offline. Your company could be missing important messages while your system is down for the hours or days it takes to get it back online. If your server has a h/w malfunction overnight, getting a replacement part shipped to you may take another day plus the time for a rebuild/restore (if needed) and factor in some time for Murphy’s laws to interact with the entire incident…you could be down for 2+ days.
Most people have a personal email account they can switch to if need be, but that takes time and isn’t going to get impromptu sales inquiries. Virtualization of your mail server will help limit your exposure to failure and/or utilization of an external party to relay your mail through so that they can cache incoming messages until your back up.
My $.02.
danm66 0 pts. | Jan 4 2007 12:04PM GMT
Another thing to keep in mind is that any users using Outlook with cached mode enabled, will have copies of the “lost” emails as long as they were online and running Outlook on the day the server goes down. Of course, if they left early in the day, then they will lose those emails that came in after they disconnected.
If you are working on a DR plan, you might want to investigate what will happen to incoming emails while the server is offline. Your company could be missing important messages while your system is down for the hours or days it takes to get it back online. If your server has a h/w malfunction overnight, getting a replacement part shipped to you may take another day plus the time for a rebuild/restore (if needed) and factor in some time for Murphy’s laws to interact with the entire incident…you could be down for 2+ days.
Most people have a personal email account they can switch to if need be, but that takes time and isn’t going to get impromptu sales inquiries. Virtualization of your mail server will help limit your exposure to failure and/or utilization of an external party to relay your mail through so that they can cache incoming messages until your back up.
My $.02.
JeffSloan 0 pts. | Jan 11 2007 11:39AM GMT
What about a mail archiving solution? They can be had for not too much money, and will also protect you and the users from their own mistakes. How many times have you been asked to help recover a freshly deleted e-mail that just arrived a few hours ago. “I didn’t mean to delete it.”
With live archiving, all e-mail, and in the case of unified messaging, voice mail and faxes are always stored seperatly from the Exchange server. And in some solutions cases, the users have the ability to restore their own “lost” messages. I am sure there are several out there, but one for instance now does all this and all without even needing an SQL server. Check out GFI’s MailArchiver for example. No, I don’t work for them…
Christine Herbert 140 pts. | Jan 26 2008 12:10AM GMT
What about using Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS)? It’s not as good as getting a third-party enterprise backup product, but it sounds like it might be a good interim measure for you if you aren’t able to afford the purchase of a third-party backup product right now.
There are pros and cons to using VSS though, so you’ll need to weigh all the issues before making an ultimate decision. Here are a couple articles that will help you learn how VSS works, as well as its strengths and weaknesses as a “snapshot” backup method.
