Ok, is this backup going to tape or to disk? If it is going to tape drive, this would take comparatively more time, because it has to go back to live mailboxes to build the catalog information so that you can see the mailboxes and mail messages in the restore selections. The reason why the catalog has to be collected during backup is because of GRT, as it has to show granular information. So, it needs to go to each mailbox, authenticate and build granular information, which considering the number of mailboxes and size of data, would definitely be a time consuming task, specially if the data has to go to tape. But, if it goes to disk, the time take would reduce.

Please mark it a solution, if this is useful.
Thanks

The configuration is B2D2T, Backup 2 Disk 2 Tape.

The updating catalogs appears while it is still performing the Backup 2 Disk before the duplication to tape begins.
 

Did it go faster sometime in the past?

Actually, there are some problems with exchange, which occured with a Hotfix between SP2 and SP3.
At the moment, I stick with the comment, that every problem occuring on exchange backups could be related to this.

I got customers which had to revert to a RAWS with SP2 to get backups running again.
So if this backup didn't act like that before, I would say try to install RAWS with SP2 and run the job again.

best regards

Dominik

We just implemented this configuration the day after SP3 came out, so I am unsure what the perfomance would be like pre-SP3.

The backup is occuring on the local media server (no agent), so that further compounds my situation.

Anyone from Symantec have a comment on this?

You said "The backup is occuring on the local media server (no agent)"
could you please explain that to me? Is the Exchange installed on the Backup Exec server?

Correct, no remote agent.

We're using SSO, so Exchange data, once backed up to disk, is being duplicated right from the SAN to the HP MSL2024 library with no network in between.
 

Anyone have any comment on this?