Symantec Enterprise Vault - Replace mailbox backups?

So coming into an environment where they do daily fulls as well as mailbox backups (using netbackup 6.5) with no current archive utility, would the addition of Enterprise Vault (as the archive solution as well) give me a good excuse to stop them from doing brick level mailbox backups (that have a tendency to fail). I am not sure of the RTO as of yet, I know they have a single storage group about 70GBs and steady.

With my lack of experience with EV I cannot speak to its abilities, would maybe even using Journaling for the users be a better option? I really want to get away from the single user mailbox backups.

Please lend your suggestions and experiences. It would be certainly appreciated!

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sidsanders

get recovery manager for exchange from quest. with that we no longer did mailbox backups. you can restore a mailbox from a full to a non exchange machine. ent vault would be useful for other things (centralized psts, moving old mail out of mb's, etc), though the cost was more than recov mgr as i recall.

HeroPsycho

BackupExec and NetBackup (although NetBackup requires backups to disk for this feature, BEWS can do this from disk or tape backups) both support granular restore now from a standard backup. You don't need EV to provide the functionality you're looking for.

CoryS

Interesting. So you are saying there is a way to do more of a granular restore and not have to restore the whole db to an RSG, and this option is NOT setting up the traditional mailbox backup?

FYI I am not being sarcastic, I am really quite curious. I need to get more information on these products, time to really dig into the documentation and stop skimming!

Thanks for the heads up Hero. Also, its good to see you are still around here!

sidsanders

recov mgr for exch restores to a non-exch machine. it can restore from backups done via netbackup, backupexec, ca, offline exchange backups, etc.... it simulates an exchange server, restores the db and you can extract mailboxes, individual mssgs. restores to pst or target mailbox. supports pub folders as well. nice thing about it: if you patch or upgrade exch, your old backups in most cases cant be restored. they can be with recov mgr for exch. ive had to reach back to 5.5 and 2k backups and been able to restore items with this tool. we use netbackup and i dropped mailbox level backups years ago. the updates to netbackup may also be useful, though i havent used those since we had the quest tool.

blargoe

You don't really want to use EV as a backup solution. Journaling is really more of a message logging function than a personal archive or a backup (for DR purposes) solution. EV can archive a mailbox to disk and leave the actual contents of the mailbox intact, sort of like a backup I guess, but you will commit suicide if you have to use this as your DR solution.

joey74055

blargoe wrote: »

You don't really want to use EV as a backup solution. Journaling is really more of a message logging function than a personal archive or a backup (for DR purposes) solution. EV can archive a mailbox to disk and leave the actual contents of the mailbox intact, sort of like a backup I guess, but you will commit suicide if you have to use this as your DR solution.

+1

I agree. If you need to do a restore do it from tape, like blargoe said EV is more for journaling and archiving, useful for finding those messages needed in a court hearing. You can restore messages back form EV but for whole mailboxes tape or backup is better. EV is great for finding a few deleted messages, much quicker than a backup restore but for big jobs it would get quite tedious.

CoryS

The idea wasnt to use this as the DR piece, but a way to get rid of mailbox backups within the org. We do nightly fulls of the store as well and all that jazz for DR purposes.

I was looking for a way to piggyback the granular mailbox single item restores on top of an archive solution I suppose. First and foremost I should address the archive solution and see if it can serve this other goal.

I have used journaling but it was for an ad hoc solution for archiving and it worked well for my needs then, but now I need a more full feature, reliable and something that will hold up under regulations when audits come in.

Thanks for chiming in everyone!

blargoe

It's really more for single item restores? Do you often have user that need something restored that goes beyond the deleted item retention period? Just curious. I rarely run into that over here.

EV is a GREAT product, and it COULD accomplish your goals for single item restore, but its far from optimal for that purpose. If I had to use EV for that, I'd have the archiving policy archive all mailbox contents immediately but leave original items in the mailbox for a few days before deleting them. Finally, you'd have to set it so that users can't delete items from their own archive. Then you'd have a way for users to self service their item restores... but the users would be losing a lot of the flexibility and control over their EV archive.

NBU does support the granular restore as HP was saying.