Application Aware or Not Application Aware for Exchange?

[chi-ltd]

So, we had this enabled and our exchange backups were failing. Result/response from Veeam was to move our info store from c:\ to d:\ (yes i know). However a short term fix was to disable application aware to ensure the backups completed.
Further testing proved i could restore exchange items from the backups (even though i had one error message - it still resotred..).

So, my question is what does application aware do for exchange and should we be using it?

Thanks

[Shestakov]

So, my question is what does application aware do for exchange and should we be using it?

Application-aware image processing helps to create transactionally consistent backup images of VMs.
Restoring transactionally consistent backups ensures safety of data for applications running on VMs. In contrast to it, restoring crash-consistent backup is essentially equivalent to rebooting a server after a hard reset.

So, we had this enabled and our exchange backups were failing. Result/response from Veeam was to move our info store from c:\ to d:\ (yes i know).

What kind of errors did you get? Do I understand correctly, you contacted technical support for the issue investigation? Thanks!

[Gostev]

Exchange items are just a part of the story. Thing is, our item-level recovery tools are specifically designed to work from crash-consistent backups (such as from storage snapshots for example). However, Microsoft will not support non-application aware backups of Microsoft Exchange if you need to restore the entire VM. Just something to keep in mind.