Backup & Archiving Community Blog

I wanted to post this article from storagemagazine because I was suprised that 63 of the respondents to this survey are not using an age or quota based policy.....

Growing need for email archiving by Rich Castagna Issue: Oct 2009

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Hello All,

In our field many of the times we need to migrate the data from volume-to-volume or may be folder-to-folder. In these cases simple copy paste won't help us.

Recently I had ended up in the same remedy of moving B2D data from one storage LUN to another with data size crossing TB. Copy paste was giving errors, stopping in between, blah blah...

Then I used these tools from Microsoft to copy the data and it worked very well.

That is why I am sharing these tools to you. These are free utilities from Microsoft.

RichCopy -

This utility is written by a Microsoft engineer named Derk Benisch. This is nothing but the GUI version of the very popular Robocopy command-line utility.

For more information and to download RichCopy refer to below mentioned link.

http...

Within our organisation we are solely concerned with email archiving. We have six Exchange 2000 active/passive clusters, with a dedicated EV server attached to each split equally across two data centres.

Before our virtualisation adventure took place we were running our EV email archiving servers on end of life hardware (End of life when the project implemented EV), which with ever increasing frequency of hardware failures took place. Typically mirrored disks would go down, raid card battery failures, RSA cards not functioning, the list goes on. It was just one big headache; and that was only the hardware.

For the software we were running on 2007 7.5 SP1, which seemed to give us no end of users complaining about their emails not completely archiving and their mailboxes not decreasing in size. We were also running on Windows 2003 SP1; which Symantec had advised us several times has serious shortcomings with MSMQs. Essentially the outgoing queues did not get processed...

Protecting the VMware environment has its own unique set of data protection challenges. There are basically three ways to protect VMware: the guest OS method, the console backup method and the VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) method. The guest OS method treats each virtual machine as a standalone server and backups take place as usual as if the virtual is physical server. The second practice is the console backup practice, in which virtualisation administrators back up the VMware ESX Server with no regard of the underlying virtual machines in the ESX environment. (There is a “free” product, ESXi, but it has no console, and requires add-ons to manage.)

VCB Backup requires VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and initially SAN attached disk (iSCSI or Fibre Chanel) but now supports VMFS with local, JBOD, iSCSI and Fibre-Channel-attached disk, network file system (NFS) and virtual compatibility mode raw device mapping (RDM). The only mode not currently supported is physical...