Best way to back up Exchange databases only to tape

[martin_nz]

Hello
What is the best way to back up Exchange databases to tape to the point where they are able to be restored and then viewed by the Veeam Exchange Explorer

[Andreas Neufert]

Hello Martin, this is not possible. Veeam backs up data on image level and therefore we have to at least stage a week or so on disk before you offload/copy the data to tape. As we have to mount the filesystem of the Exchange Server which are in the end random IO workloads, you can not directly restore from tape. You can restore exchange items from the disk stage area or our wizard will first restore the data to disk from tape before the Exchange Explorer start. You need disk space for this.

[martin_nz]

OK thanks for that
I currently back up a reverse incremental full image of my Exchange server to tape each night. When i need to restore from it I just restore the full backup file then explore it with the Exchange Explorer. is this an acceptable way of doing such a task?

[Andreas Neufert]

Correct. If you use Backup to Tape Jobs then the explorer can do the staging for you. But manual staging for the Explorer is fine as well.

[soncscy]

Hey Martin,

Can you explain for a non-exchange admin why you want this? One of my client asked this years ago, and as I was researching, MS' own documentation advised that for Exchange restores you have to restore all databases and logs in the DAG to be supported.

They eventually dropped the request to me because of whatever but I never understood this request. Why the interest to restore a single DB as opposed to individual Exchange items? I ask to understand, not as a challenge, as my client never clarified their request.