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The Barking Seal

• Nightmares restoring mailboxes with BackupExec and Exchange 2007

  19Jun
  Author: ben Categories: Infrastructure, Ramblings Comments: 0

  Imagine a world in which you had diligently backed up data in your Active Directory and Exchange environment every day, carefully labeling your tapes and filing them away to an off-site storage facility in case you one day encountered a server failure. Continuing in our Imaginationland, pretend that a real scenario arose  in which you had none of your domain controllers, Exchange systems, backup servers, or any of the environment in which the backups were created, but you still need to recover some of your mail data. Would you take comfort in the knowledge that your recovery tapes were a short drive away?

  If you’re using Symantec’s Backup Exec product, I wouldn’t be so sure. Read on for more of my rant on Symantec… and partially Microsoft.

  Recovery from tape has always been a little bit of technology and a lot of hope, but Backup Exec takes it to a new level. For starters, try to find a complete guide to configuring backups and restores with Exchange 2007. There are dozens of forum posts in Symantec’s support forums along with knowledge base articles with misleading titles like “Exchange Agent How to” and “Best practices for Backup Exec Agent for Microsoft Exchange Server.” Do not be fooled. None of these articles contain a definitive list, or in many cases even a partial list, of what actually needs to occur to restore the environment.

  In my case, new errors were encountered after each slight success. First, the tape media could not be cataloged. Having already installed an identical version of Backup Exec, I followed several knowledge base articles to eliminate the error I was encountering. No luck. I switched to a different tape and it cataloged successfully (about 2 days in a this point).

  The next step is to restore the data to Exchange. Unfortunately, there are a whole host of requirements that aren’t well documented by Symantec, including (but not limited to):

  • The Exchange server must have the same host name as the old Exchange server, even if you’re doing a redirect operation.
  • The Exchange Organization name must be the same.
  • Ideally, you have a full and recent backup of Active Directory, which should be restored first. In theory, the mailboxes can be restored to a new directory, but I haven’t yet had success with that.
  • You must create new user (I called mine “recovery”) in the directory and log in to the mailbox at least once before attempting a restore.
  • The Backup Exec logon account (mine was a test environment so I just used administrator) should also have an Exchange mailbox that has been accessed at least once.

  Other issues I encountered:

  • The debug logs that can be enabled are useless and give no indication of the error.
  • Backup Exec “stages” the recovery before attempting to restore to Exchange. It takes N minutes (in my case, N=25) to pull the data from tape, during which it stores it in a temporary, proprietary format on disk. After that, it attempts to access Exchange and load the data. When it fails, the staged data is deleted, causing  the restore to take another N minutes on the next attempt.

  Being an IT guy can be a huge exercise in frustration.

  
  Tags: Backups, rants