I thought I read once that the urbackup can grab the Exchange database files or live SQL files, is this true or am I making this up?
I’m having trouble with a test restore of exchange, when I try to mount the database after copying the files back in, and after running eseutil /p it says there is a database mismatch and won’t mount the store.
Before I spend to much more time on it I wanted to double check that this is suppose to be possible.
Thanks.
I mentioned it in the FAQ, because it is supposed to be possible. UrBackup does backup the files in a crash consistent state after all.
It does not backup permissions or ACLs though, maybe the exchange server user does not have the appropriate rights?
I backup a exchange server myself, so if you do not get it to work I’ll try a restore too.
I needed the hardware I was doing the test restore on for another project so I have to start over. I’ll let you know.
Ok, so I figured out a few things.
I got the database to mount by running eseutil /p and then moving any log files out of the folder where the database was. The database would then mount, but I noticed all my mailboxes only had mail as recent as 1 week ago. Upon further investigation I noticed that the modified time on the .edb on the Urbackup server was also 1 week old.
Long story short, I had urbackup configured to do full backups once a week, and incremental daily. It was only grabbing the .edb on the ‘full backup’ that took place once a week.
It would be helpful if we could disable incremental backups. I plan script to periodically grab all my urbackup data and send it off site, using only the ‘current’ data set if I would be unlucky enough for that to only have an incremental backup of exchange…that wouldn’t be good.
Also if I send an ‘incremental’ vhd I imagine it wouldn’t be complete without the previous vhd also. I plan to only grab the most recent ‘vhd’ so again this would be a problem if it happened to be an incremental one.
Thanks for the great project,
Jason.
I have looked into this and it seems like Exchange does not change the last modification time on the database file even if it is changed (See http://blogs.technet.com/b/timmcmic/archive/2010/08/22/exchange-databases-and-date-modified-timestamps.aspx ). This is a problem, because UrBackup looks at this time to decide if files should be included in incremental backups.
Fortunately there is a way to avoid this problem and I’ll fix the newest version to backup files that have been changed but do not have a changed last modification time.
Currently there is not nice way to disable incremental backups other than increasing the interval to a higher time. I have changed that too.
I’ll test those two changes and report back here.
The version here should not have this issue:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/urbackup/files/Client/1.0RC/
Awesome, thank you!