9.1 freezes when backing up Exchange 2000 Mailbox

[Benjaminle]

I have W2K, E2K and BE9.1. My backup are running fine fall all the files and servers. When it comes to backing up Exchange mailbox, the backup started to freeze. It says that it is running but it doesn't stop. No error message was found. I had to cancel the backup job and restart my server to get BE up and running again. It can backup Exchange public folder and information store. It just got stuck in Mailboxes. Help?

 

[PBurcin]

Veritas BackupExec V9.x will perform a mailbox backup, but it will never be efficient. This is per Veritas! The Veritas Exchange agent must talk to the Exchange server services in order to create mailbox backups. This is where the slowness is a built-in by product of what you are trying to backup!! We have approx. 600 mailboxes on two Exchange 5.5 servers using BE9.x for backup. It took 12 hours for this backup during the last weekend backups. This is not a network slowness issue as we are using GB NICs in all servers and have a 10GB backbone for the LAN. Our tape library is brand new with 2 LTO-2 tape drives in it. We do not try any longer to create mailbox backups during the week.

 

[Benjaminle]

Hi PBurcin,
What you wrote is true about backing up Exchange mailbox. But my issue is different. Even if I waited for hours or days, the backup of the mailbox will not stop. It says that it is running but it is not. It doesn't stop and give you an error, it just stayed running.

 

[justin2000]

Benjaminle

Wondering if these things may be causing the issue..
1. Single instance storage backup of mailboxes - turn this off see how you go.
2. Can you backup 1 mailbox in a test job?
3. Anti virus - if you are scanning and trying to backup this is not good as the 2 programs are trying to do the same thing.

FYI, Pburcin - the backup slowness of Mailboxes are not a product of what backup program you use - it is because when the backup happens, what it will do it open every mailbox, and extract each mail message out.
It is very similar to doing an Exmerge or using Outlook to export the mailbox to a pst.

 

[Benjaminle]

Hi Justin,
Thanks for the reply. Single instance has always turned off. I ran the test backup on 1 mailbox and it went through just fine. I disabled virus-scanning and ran Exchange mailbox backup lastnight and the same thing happened. Right after it backup tried to finish the last mailbox, it just hung. I can see from the job monitor that the byte count was about the same size was correct for all the mailboxes. When I viewed the Job Activity, it says that it is running and the Current directory was the mailbox/Views from the person with the name Y, the last on the alphabet. And it's not doing anything else, the Job Rate start to decrease until it gets to 0KB/Min because it averaged out the overal time vs the amount of data backed up.

 

[turktown]

Do you find that the Backup Exec Remote agent and BE jobengine have halted? If so, I currently have a support call logged with Veritas about this issue.
We find the jobengine crashes when accessing particular mailboxes (presumably finds a corrupt mail attachment). This is repeatable. Have tried ex-merging mailbox and recreating it, upgrading BE9.0 to BE9.1 etc.
Normally the job log would record a corrupt item and continue but this kills the backup, so currently only information store is being backed up.

If Veritas produce a solution I will post something here.

 

[Benjwhitlock]

Hi Benjaminle

Have exactly the same issue - been through all the tests you have. HAve called Veritas support - they are aware of the issue under Veritas Tech ID 266744. They say they are working on the issue with their "level 4" exchange guy. If he does not have it in his list of things to fix it will not be addressed until next major release circ June 2004. Are you US or UK or elswhere? Nice to hear from someone who has the same annoying issue.

 

[Benjaminle]

Hi everyone,
I contacted Veritas and they told me that this issue that we have is a known defect in BE 9.1. The tech told me that if I uninstall 9.1 and reinstall 9.0. My problem will be gone. I did that. The problem still exists. The only workaround for this issue was devide your mailboxes in to separate backups. I created 2 backup jobs for Exchange 2K mailboxes. One is for the end-users from remote offices and the other was for internal. For some reason, when i did this, it worked. But when I added all the mailboxes together as 1 backup job, I have this problem.