Hello, just my humble experience here...

As posted, Veritas has been doing this for years and we've had it in place for 
years. As we are new Tivoli users, we did not purchase the Tivoli Exchange 
license (pretty expensive!), but continue to use Veritas (now 9.1), on our new 
Exchange 2003 server. We let Tivoli backup the bi-weekly Full Veritas mailbox 
file, then backup daily Veritas mailbox incrementals. 

Fun thing is we cannot backup the Exchange 2003 store now with our older 
Veritas Exchange license... we'd have to upgrade the Veritas license for 2003, 
still cheaper than Tivoli. We would need this to flush the Exchange logs after 
a Full backup. Instead, I use the MS Backup to do the store backup weekly, this 
output again backed up by Tivoli.

Why we do all this is strange anyway, I guess for mostly legal reasons. If 
you've ever had to restore an e-mail from a year or two ago (we had to for 
legal reasons), it's like shooting in the dark... or finding a needle in a 
haystack. We are not a big company and MIS resources are tight (as many of you 
probably are). Each of us handles 24 things. Spare servers sitting around are 
next to impossible, unless you are a financial, pharmaceutical, Walmart, IBM, 
MicroSoft .. any company that makes BIG money.. you live in your own worlds 
believe me.

Anyway, since e-mail backups are done at points of time, an e-mail might arrive 
then disappear (deleted or moved automatically or by the user to a personal 
folder) before it's backed up. Sync that with personal folder backups etc. and 
it's real fun. Try to restore an Exchange 5.5 store to a 2003 server, or to 
another testbed server.. you have to use the same server name for the store 
etc. Then find the missing e-mails by restoring every backup and/or backup logs 
from 2 years ago... no wonder the 3 day thing.

Charlie Hurtubise
charlieh AT tecsys DOT com 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU]On Behalf Of
Remco Post
Sent: Monday, March 15, 2004 11:38 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: veritas backup exec client and TSM server


Hi all,

one of my users pointed out to me that veritas backup exec 9.1 supports a
few features that could make this a usefull product for them:

1- restore of single mailboxes or messages in exchange
2- TSM server as storage
3- better centralisation of backup logging for non-TSM administrators

This does indeed seem to be the case. So now my question is, does anybody
have experience with such a set-up? What are the up and down-sides of an
environment with veritas clients on a TSM client? In particular the first
and the third feature do appeal to them, since restoring a single mail
message now takes them about 3 days!

The other question one might ask, is IBM ever going to wake up and realise
that these features are a show-stopper for implementations of their product
in an exchange environment? It now seems we have a viable alternative to spent
our money (hint!!!).

-- 
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post

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