Exchange DAG backup, excluding other drives from job

[DanielB_Ger]

Hello everyone,

I discussed a topic regarding Microsoft Exchange DAG backup with support (case 04893816). I'd like to submit a Feature Request.

Scenario is as follows:
2 Exchange servers running DAG, we back up the servers once per day. Furthermore we want to back up DAG only more frequently (for example every hour).
To prevent the data to be stored on the repositories we excluded some drives like C:, since the databases, logs, etc. are stored on other drives.
Now if we want to open a database via Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, we have to manully type in or browse for the path to the logs folder. Afterwards everything works fine.

As support told me this might be due to the fact that C: is excluded from backup. But since it cannot be a lot of information missing, is there any way to create a special DAG backup job which only backs up DAG databases and information, and excluding everythin unnecessary?

If there are any questions feel free to ask. If you need further information you might reach back to me via the case mentioned above.

Thanks in advance!

Best regards,
Daniel

[Andreas Neufert]

For us the registry is then not backed up and we can not look up the database places.
It is not possible in the way you have setup the backup job.

I would argue, that this is anyway not a good idea. If you have a disaster you can not just boot the server and have to manually do a lot of things like configuring Exchange restoring database files adding them again.

If you process backups with guest processing and as well the c drive, then you can just restore the server with network enabled and we will bring the server in Exchange VSS recover mode, that will force the restored exchange to look up for the latest Exchange things and replicate them with the other servers before they bring everything online.

When you look at backup space needed for this, is very minimimal as the change rate is not that high. We will exclude pagefile, so block changes on the c drive are not really much data when you create backups hourly.

[DanielB_Ger]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for your reply!
First of all I found the reason for large hourly incremental backups: Pagefile exclusion is enabled, but still it consumes around 4GB every hour (total size of pagefile up to 32GB).
Since on that machine the pagefile is on a seperate drive, we can do it as you said.

I just wonder whether we had the same issue if the pagefile was on C drive. But for the time, this should work.

Still, might it be possible to extend the VBR functionality by pure DAG backups?
If we have one backup of the whole system per day, why not using the same strategy as with SQL servers and only backup databases every x minutes?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

[Andreas Neufert]

In case of databases, we are developing more and more plug-ins which allows you to use the native database tools such as Oracle RMAN to store database backups on our Repository.

We do not have this planned for Exchange.
As I shared we always think an image level backup is from great value in case of disasters. Specifically as the Exchange VSS recovery automatic processing makes it super simple in case a server is gone to restore it on image level. It is unlikely that we change this strategy as it brings so much great value with very little overhead.

[DanielB_Ger]

Understood. Thanks for your explanations!
I'll close this case then.

Cheers!