What is the fastest way to back-up a MS-Exchange Server?

Question

We have a company of about 25 people and our exchange server is taking about 14-15 hours to back up on to an external hard drive every night. I believe we're using the backup software that came with the Seagate External hard drives that we backup to. I see a lot of ads online, but I don't know which ones to trust. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

The problem is it's an external hard drive. An external drive doesn't have anywhere near the data through-put as an internal drive.

I would highly recommend buying an internal drive and backup to it OR buying a tape backup system to backup to. We use the Exabyte VA-2 system. Just make sure it's a SCSI drive for fast data through-put.


Obviously, you want to keep the tapes off-site if you choose to go this route. I keep two weeks of tapes at home (I'm the IT Manager for my employer). I grab todays tape (Wednesday) and then put it in the drive and take Tuesday home when I leave work today. I have the backup set to run at 10pm every night and it's done by 8am every morning and we backup around 60Gigs of data each night and have about 23 users on our Exchange system. We just have tons of other data, also.

Hypothetically, if you have a break-in during the night, you only lost yesterdays data and not a whole week if you only backup once a week.


I could go on and on about this, but the bottom line here is the problem lies in the fact you're using an external hard drive. Either buy an internal hard drive and locate your server somewhere where it's very hard to find and/or physically lock it up...or buy a tape backup system.

email/pm me for more assistance if you need it.