Re: brick level backup after upgrade to 4.0(4)

Avner Izhar · ‎02-10-2005

Hi,

Went from 4.0(3) to 4.0(4) and the message store backup were doubled, it seems that the backup followed some special hidden search objects in the users mailbox which made it backup many things twice.

Is it expected ?

Can I remove this unity objects ?

Avner.

lindborg · ‎02-10-2005

I'm not sure what you're talking about here - what message store backup did you use? ExMerge? Were you porting the installation to another directory or something? What unity objects are you talking about?

Avner Izhar · ‎02-10-2005

I'm backing the exchange server in a mailbox by mailbox way (brick level) so I can restore individual mail items to pepole who need it.

This specific backup got huge after the upgrade to 4.0(4), and from the logs I found it is following some links in the mailbox, which point to the same mail items but from another view, so it backup things twice.

Don't have the specific unity object names, will have them on sunday.

lindborg · ‎02-11-2005

That still doesn't tell me much - HOW are you doing the backup? ExMerge IS a brick level backup tool - each mailbox is saved in its own PST file - are you using this? If not, please tell me EXACTLY what you're doing - I can't do much to help with this vauge information.

Unity is not doing something to your mailstore to double your messages - this sounds like more of an issue with Exchange and/or whatever mysterious backup mechanism you're using. If you pop open Outlook for one of these mailboxes, presumably you don't have two copies of every message, right? If so I'm n ot real sure what you want us to do from our side of the fence...

Avner Izhar · ‎02-12-2005

The backup software is Veritas BackupExce version 9.1.

Unity added an object named "Cisco Search Folders" to every Unity subscriber.

Under the "Cisco Search Folders" there are many folders with names like: FilterNewEmail, FilterNewFax, FilterNewMsg etc.

This folder are different viwes of the same mail items, but the backup trace them and rebackup the same items.

It was not there in unity 4.0(3).

Thank you, Avner.

lindborg · ‎02-13-2005

The search folders are there to speed up phone access to your message stacks - they are like indexes in a database - they are not duplicates of the messages, of course. If Veritas is backing the messages up twice (or more since there are several search folder views), it's a bug in their backup routines - search folders are fairly common items - in 4.0(4) we added a few additional ones to improve performance from over the phone interface.

I'll forward to the folks in the messaging group to see if they've seen anything like this.

jack.richardson · ‎02-14-2005

This is normal for BackExec. Fortunately you have v9 or higher which allows you to exclude specific folders (we have v8.6 which does not provide this functionality). I would recommend you exclude those folders from your backup process (as you indicated they are duplicated in other areas of the mailbox). See the Veritas knowledge base for instructions (search on exclude folders from backup).

Avner Izhar · ‎02-14-2005

Can I select not to use this search folders, and avoid the creation of them in the subscribers inbox ?

Thanks, Avner.

craigp · ‎02-15-2005

In the exchange section of your backup job there should be a check box for single instance backup.Checking this box will only back up a message once regardless of how many 'pointers' there are to that message in other folders.

paul.goulding · ‎02-20-2005

Hi, did you manage to reslove this issue? I have exactly the same problem. Is there a way that prevents this from being selected once the subscriber is created?

Thanks

Avner Izhar · ‎02-20-2005

It seems that the only resolution is to uncheck the checkbox in BackupExec, I havent heard of any solution from the unity side (and I opened a formal case on this issue).

Avner.

STEPHEN HAXTON · ‎03-09-2005

I have a customer with the exact same issue. After the upgrade from 4.0.3 to 4.0.4 the Veritas Backup Exec job for exchange doubled in size. Any word as to why the big change when upgrading to 4.0.4? Is Excluding the folders from the backup the correct thing to do and does this have an affect on the restoration process for Exchange mailboxes of Unity subscribers?

lindborg · ‎03-09-2005

You should tell Backup Exec not to backup duplicate messages (noted earlier on this thread) - the increase in size is due to the fact that it's considering messages referenced by the new indexes we added (working with MS to improve performance of message counts, log on times etc...). They shouldn't consider these messages (they're not) - if you turn the option on to not backup duplicate messages it wont bloat your backup size.

no, this wont have any impact on the restore process. Those indexes are rebuilt as necessary anyway so that's not a problem.