On Fri, Sep 07, 2007 at 11:24:16PM +1000, James Harper wrote: > > > > 1. Bacula *really* needs some way to backup Exchange in a way that if > the > > user/admin wants, he can restore a single mail box. If you are > working on > > such a feature, it would be *very* interesting to us. > > > > FWIW, Microsoft strongly discourage so-called 'brick level' (individual > email) backups of the Exchange database - they are really slow, and > frequently error prone.
By "brick level" do they mean entire MAPI objects with all state, or just some extracted information such as the mail data? We're interested in both. As to speed, I suspect this is very largely server implementation issue, in fact the more I look at Exchange 2007 the more I'm convinced of it. After the libmapi client release we'll be concentrating on the server, and will be very interested to see if Backup Exec can't run substantially faster against the same data :-) > My experience with Backup Exec confirms this - on a system with a 70GB > mailstore, the database backup takes about 30 minutes, and the 'brick > level' backup takes about 6 hours, and frequently complains about > 'corrupt mailbox items' (eg something with a strange Unicode character > in it not understood by the current configuration). If you watch openchange svn you should soon have something to test by doing OpenChange brick-level backups and seeing if they go better. I'd be surprised if some of this is not also client-side implementation, in which case we can fix it, if we exhibit similar problems. > And for proper recovery purposes, you need to do both > types of backups so you are doubling the amount of data you are backing > up (actually worse because the 'brick level' backup suffers from a > certain amount of bloat) I can't see how any of the foregoing is true in the general case, merely in the case where people are using incomplete or inefficient client tools to do the job. If you can extract all MAPI objects with all MAPI properties, then you can reconstruct a MAPI data store. Ok, there is Exchange meta-data, and AD data, but backing up the entirety of say public folders with full permissions and properties is what we're looking to do. > All of that being said, everyone says 'brick level' backups are a bad > idea, but everyone implements them... We're learning about that now. Thanks a lot for your comments. We really don't have the experience in this area and need people like you for testing. -- Dan Shearer [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ devel mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openchange.org/listinfo/devel
