Veritas-bu

[Veritas-bu] NBU to backup exchange without the exchange client? Anyone backing up Cisco Unity System?

2004-05-11 10:25:23
Subject: [Veritas-bu] NBU to backup exchange without the exchange client? Anyone backing up Cisco Unity System?
From: ewilts AT ewilts DOT org (Ed Wilts)
Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 09:25:23 -0500
On Tue, May 11, 2004 at 09:35:46AM -0400, Goldfarb, Josh wrote:
> The only real answer to this question is to buy the Exchange Agent.  It
> will guarantee whether or not you have a good backup or not.  Once the
> backup is complete it will clean up the Log files as well.  E-mail is to
> critical and it must be backed up properly.  

I disagree - you have TWO options:
1.  Buy the agent.
2.  Shut down Exchange prior to doing your backups.  

How critical e-mail is to you is not for us to decide.  If your e-mail
only needs to be available during business hours, there might be nothing
wrong with shuttting down during offhours and backing it up. 

This is essentially the same argument as backing up any database - you
simply can not do a normal file system backup without quiescing the
application and putting it into a known good state first.

Simply tell your manager you have to shut down Exchange every weekend to
do a backup and that he better be prepared to lose up to 6 days worth of
data if you need to restore.  If he can't afford to lose that, tell him
you need to shut down every day and lose up to a day's worth of data.
If he wants Exchange up all the time, buy the agent - or find a cheaper
agent that can back up to disk that NetBackup can then roll to tape.

It's unfortunate how many people think they can deploy new applications
without determining how they'll back up and recover. Some think about
backups but not recoveries (hint:  users don't care about backups - they
only care about recoveries).  I've seen people buy disk drives but not
blank tapes and then get confused as to why we run out of tapes (just
where did you think the data was going to be backed up to?).

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org