What are you using for Brick-Level Backups?

[10base2]

I'm currently using Arcserve 2000 and the Arcserve Exchange Agent to do brick level backups and restores with NT4.0 and Exchange 5.5 SP4. Our info store is about 60GB with more than 5000 mailboxes. It takes more than 40 hours to do a brick level backup. Simple database backups with no bricks take about an hour. The hardware is adequate: Poweredge 6400 Quad-Xeon 700, 4GB RAM, LTO2 tape drive, and the store is on an external RAID 5 fibre-channel connected array. I've been told that the Exchange agent and the way it uses the mapi interface is the bottleneck here. What's your Exchange backup strategy? How often do you guys do brick level backups? What product do you use for brick backups? Is Arcserve 11 any good?

 

[rdroske]

Youch on 40 hours. Mine is only 15 GB and I still don't bother with individual mailbox backups.

If I need one I restore the whole store to a different machine and export what I need to .pst

Of course I don't have to do it that often, with 5000 users could be impractical.

I have Veritas writing to an HP 80GB DLT. If no one else posts for that I'll run a brick level tonight and let you know how long it takes for 200+ and 15GB at least.

Wow, 40 hours. Means someone could be a day and a half behind when you did need a restore. Fair chance what they accidently deleted wouldn't be there anyways...

I do log backups of the full store every hour that only hit the server for a minute or so.

Have you ever timed a restore of the full store?