Question in Regards to Restore Performance and Backup Mode T

[HJAdams123]

Hello and Good Evening Veeam Community...

I am currently backing up some rather large Exchange 2010 mailbox servers. These servers are about 7TB in total size. They are generating anywhere from 200-250GB worth of change each day. The backups take about 12 hours to complete. I am doing reverse incrementals mainly for two reasons...

1. To save on space.

2. To give my Exchange Administrator better restore performance, because most of his restores are from last night, or just a few days ago. Having the last backup be a full backup is a nice performance feature for him....

I would like to try doing forever incrementals with these servers. Which this job, I have to get 30 restore points on disk. I know for a fact switching to this method would be fantastic for my backup speed, I am willing to bet it would reduce the backup time to 2 hours instead of 12. But, I know my Exchange Administrator won't be happy from a restore standpoint when he has to mount a vbk from 30 days ago, as well as mount 28-29 increments to get to last nights backup data for a restore. What do you think? Is there anyway he can do restore differently to make the Exchange Restore client load faster? I know one of his complaints is often times in the Exchange Application Restore applet, it has to load each and every Exchange database into the application before he is allowed to restore the data he needs....Is there a way to just load the database that needs to be restored without having to wait for them all to load? If I can figure this out for him, maybe I can negotiate switching to forever incrementals....what do you guys think?

Thanks!

-Harold

[Shestakov]

Hello Harold,
I see what you described above as a trade-off between Faster recovery from the newest restore point, Saving space on your repositories and Faster backup processing.
The question is what`s more critical for you. If you(your Exchange Administrator) want to have the fastest recovery, Reversed Incremental method is the way to go since the most recent restore point is always the full VBK file; but, yes the method requires doing those 3 I/Os while the VM snapshot is open, means takes more time.
As a compromise I would offer to use simple forward incremental method with weekly Full backups if you are ready to sacrifice some additional repository space. Among advantages are faster recovery(shortet chains) and faster daily backups.
Hope that helps. Thanks.

[foggy]

30 points chain is not the one that could seriously affect restore performance, so I would definitely try to switch to forever forward incrementals.

Regarding your second question, you can use FLR to mount the backup, open Veeam Explorer for Exchange manually, and then browse for the required database, instead of starting Exchange Application Items Restore by right-clicking on the restore point.

[HJAdams123]

Foggy, can you provide details on how that's done? My Exchange Administrator is going to want to do the application aware restore tool for Exchange so he can restore items as a PST file, or a *.msg file. I don't think you can do that is you are doing a Windows Guest\File Level restore. One of the things he complains about is how the Exchange Application Items Restore has to load all of the mailbox stores on the server. He wishes he can just browse directly to the store (he knows which one usually ahead of time) and restore the information he needs) Is there anyway to bypass that?

-Harold

[foggy]

When you perform FLR for the required backup file, it is mounted to the backup server and its contents becomes available under C:\VeeamFLR folder. After that you can start Veeam Explorer for Exchange manually, using the command on the Start menu, click Add Store, and browse to the required MDB file under this folder.

[HJAdams123]

Thanks Foggy. I understand the workflow now. Hopefully this can save my Exchange Admin sometime, and help in possibly trying forever incrementals....

Thanks Again!

Harold