Ok this one is frustrating and I don’t know if anyone can help but. Recently our NTbackup and Veritas backup has stopped working. According to the tech at Veritas its stopping whenever it hits Exchange 2000 more specifically Information Storage. An attempt to do an NTbackup lead to the backup just sitting there, didn’t freeze, didn’t hang, just sat there doing nothing for 2hrs. The hardest part about it is its not spitting any error messages out, nothing in the event logs. I am completely stumped and any help anyone can give would be much appreciated.
We are using Veritas backupexec 9.1 with the current service pack for it. The last successful backup was Thursday the 5th. Which is not good all in all. We just upgraded from 9.0 to 9.1+service pack about 2 days after the backup started stalling, and I say stalling because its not reallying hanging, doesnt cause any software malfucntion it just sits there. The odd part is absolutly no real changes (besides more data in the exchange) have been made to any of the servers. Is there some kind of preset maximum for storage or something setup in the back up systems?
Not that I'm aware of. But the problem does sound eerily familiar. I would start by reviewing the job log of the last few backup jobs (I'm assuming you do a backup every night). You can look up the error messages from the logs on the Veritas (now Symantec) site. If nothing comes of this, I would delete all jobs and build a new one from scratch. One thing I would avoid is the writing of checksums to the tape drive after the job has completed. This adds hours to the job and has caused problems for us in the past. How many servers are you backing up, and how are they configured? Are you using a tape changer? What size media?
Well our backup schedule is thus. We do a nightly backup every night which is a backup to disk (I hard drive located on the same server as the Veritas software) then 3 times a week we do a backup to an Exabyte tape drive. The problem persists in our nightly backup (the everyday one) and it over writes the night before backup every night. It currently backs up stuff off of I believe 3 servers, (about a total of 80gigs) pretty small for a backup I believe. We have done separate test backups, one to each server, then more specifically when we found a server that it stopped on, we started doing separate directories that were in the backup list, and narrowed it down to being only the Exchange directory and more specifically the Information Storage directory. The drive that it backs up to is 120 gigs, and as I said the backup is always within range of 80 gigs. Thinking it was the Veritas software we used NTbackup to do a backup test on the Exchange Server - Microsoft Information Storage directory and same thing, the backup starts but never passes 0%. Iv checked the job logs for 5 completed jobs before the first failure and there’s nothing that jumps out at me. I know I had Veritas tech support on the phone with me, and they had me upgrade to version 9.1 do the service pack, and then told me to do an NT backup, after the NTbackup didn’t work they conceded that our exchange database is corrupted and that there’s nothing they can do for us. Nicely spent 89 dollars. Do you know of a way to check the integrity of the exchange server for corruption?
Now I'm confused. Is it one server that won't back up or all three? If you think that one server may have a problem, does the backup run on one of the other servers? I would also scan the much-used hard drive in the main server for errors. Have you cleaned as much space as possible off this drive? When writing that much data consistently to the drive, the temp directories will fill up. Do some routine maintenance on the server - Disk Cleanup, Disk Defragmenter, etc. And if you're paying for support anyway, check out Experts Exchange. If you're doing all this for a business, $9.95/month isn't bad.
Yeah Iv been thinking about doing experts exchange, but you can search them for free, havnt found anything on there yet so I'd have to start a new topic. Its not an entire server thats having a problem, its just the exchange server which is located on our PDC (or what you could call a pdc i guess) the other servers are fine, I have successfully done a backup excluding Exchange, so that has narrowed it down to exchange, now I just how to figure out if theres any corruption.
