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I'm looking for a good Exchange 2010 on W2K8R2 Server brick level backup and restore software.. I have used Backup Exec 10 and 12 and both fail to meet even a minimum of functionality. Every single time the turds hit the fan, there was a problem with the restore. Most recently, I needed to restore an exchange edb and had been using BE's Granular Restore Technology. I KNOW the backups were completing succesfully. I could see the data in the B2D's and the job log reported succesfully. However, the B2D's could ot be re-cataloged after a Server Disaster. I had 5 B2D's and none functioned, I had to manually retrieve the EDB from the disk and use exchange management shell to import it. I then I had to manually merge all the mail accounts. I don't like paying $1200 for software that just doesn't work. Does anyone have any good experiances with BE for exchange? Can some other recommendations be made?

Wow. That does not give good fuzzy feelings for BE2010/2012 and Exchange 2010. I've done some test restores of simple files to verify the backups are working but nothing like restoring to Exchange. Do you see the issue with all files or is it specifically the EDBs?

Also, first time I heard of "brick level". In case anyone else is as uninformed as I am:

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/an ... vel-backup

Heh, this guy isn't a fan: http://www.informationweek.com/storage/ ... /229212844

The actual files were cataloged and could be restored without any problems. It was the exchange GRT data that could not be read. There is not an easy way to restore and remount an EDB to a fresh exchange install.. It has to be done in the management shell because there is no option in the management console. I normally test my backups by doing brick level restores on a regular basis and it tested OK last month. However after a complete system failure the restore couldn't be completed because none of the media could successfully be cataloged. I had to use explorer to manually copy the edb from the B2D to a new location, run eseutil to clean the db then use the shell to add and mount the database. I should have been able to just restore the mailbox content of my users through the BE interface, instead I have to use "new-mailboxrestorerequest - sourcedatabase 'database' - sourcemailbox 'lastname, firstname' -targetmailbox 'alias' -allowlegacydnmismatch" for each mailbox in the DB.

Ouch. I feel your pain, man. I just had a conference call with Symantec about our own woes with BE2012 and relayed your question to them. They have not had any reports of failures of restores in disaster recovery. They are aware of a lot of other issues, however, and of course, the all-fixing Hotfix is right around the corner. The only thing I can think of is that you might have a patch conflict of some sort, that is, the patch level of BE might be different from when the B2D set was created?

Good luck!

I haven't tested this, so you should do your diligence, but looks like if you just export your users to a csv in AD then write a small powershell script and you can do this for free. From the article

http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/arc ... 01913.aspx

"Export-Mailbox –Identity <mailboxUser> -PSTFolderPath <pathToSavePST>"

If you do a simple foreach loop to go through the csv this will dump out each users mailbox to whatever directory you like in pst format. Then simply back that up using Windows Server Backup (which is amazing) and you're done. Shouldn't take more than 15 minutes to setup.