Exchange 2016 Backup Scenario

[saint1500]

Halo - new Veeam user and first time poster!

I have been tasked with backing up our on premise Exchange 2016. 2 servers in DAG. Approximately 2 TB of data accumulated over an 8 year period. (I know, we are a small shop)...

Criteria is 4 hours RPO for disaster and the ability to retrieve an email from 6 months ago.

I would love to hear suggestions on a backup scheme that will accommodate the criteria.

Saint

[foggy]

Hi Marty, welcome to the forums. Seems you need a backup job scheduled to run every 4 hours. Don't forget to enable application-aware image processing and review this thread for some hints on backing up Exchange DAG. Thanks!

[saint1500]

Hey foggy - thanks for the reply. I am most concerned about the 6 month retention. Every time I crunch the numbers for backup scenarios with this much retention I get green. Can someone suggest a backup job that will accomplish this and keep the storage to a minimum? Remembering that RTO for us is not as important.

[nmdange]

Use Windows Server 2016 with a ReFS volume for your backup repository so Veeam can share blocks between multiple full backup files.

[DaveWatkins]

Hey foggy - thanks for the reply. I am most concerned about the 6 month retention. Every time I crunch the numbers for backup scenarios with this much retention I get green. Can someone suggest a backup job that will accomplish this and keep the storage to a minimum? Remembering that RTO for us is not as important.

Depending on the granularity you need in that 6 month span a backup copy job scheduled to run as often as required would mean you could, for example, keep only weekly backups of you exchange server from the end of your normal jobs retention out to 6 months (or whatever is required).

Trying to keep 6 months of restore points taken every 4 hours will indeed be costly. Also you only need the backup copy job to backup 1 of your exchange servers, they are in a DAG, so the data is duplicated. I'd backup both of them for the primary job, but for the backup copy job, just select a single one as the source

[Regnor]

I would also go with a backup copy job and weekly restore points, if that's sufficent.

[saint1500]

Thanks to everyone that replied to this. I have gained a further trust in Veeam and the community.

Our repository IS on Windows 2016 with ReFS and we are realizing some performance and space gains from this configuration. Glad we were able to architect the system from the ground up with a decent budget.

I knew when I got the criteria for Exchange backups there was going to be a storage hit. Did the math and got afraid. Hence this post.

Being new to Veeam I did not recognize the value and functionality of backup copy jobs and after doing some reading will probably go down that path.

I will post my final configuration once applied for those interested.

*Cheers*