Vacation!

Time to relax! I'm on vacation for the next three weeks. NO mobile, NO Laptop. That's luxury!
Until October! RU

Holy NTBACKUP

...and the winner is: nobody - at the moment - to be specific: it's Tue 10:00 PM. After struggling the whole day with the exchange stores with NO success(the stores don't replay all the logfiles - they end up with a dbtime error at some point...) we decided to move all the mailboxes to new stores, make a full backup and then monitor the system if the error happens again. Even a Call(still open) to MS directly brought no success. Then we decided to analyze the backup strategy, especially the backup solution... I swear: If they had used NTBACKUP, the restore would have been as easy as 1,2,3...(a tribute to Jackson 5!). That's what I've experienced so many times in the past: If you use a 3rd Party solution for your exchange backup, thoroughly test it - exclamation mark. And testing means not to simply backup and restore a database. Testing means taking your database(s) under stress and initiating an online backup during the stress test. Then restore the database and see if all logfiles are correctly replayed! If not - kick it(the solution) out, or ask the ISV to provide a functioning release of the product. Or, simply use NTBACKUP(don't forget to test it anyway!) to backup your exchange databases to a file. Then backup this file to tape. This multi-tier approach enables you to restore the database from disk(which is faster than the tape) and also has the advantage of assuring that the databases are backuped and restored "the Microsoft way" (meaning that the correct API-Calls are made).

Please! Only one day!

It's been a typical monday: After working several weeks without a break, I planned to have a relaxing day off... But not on this monday! 9:24 AM - a customer call - two exchange store's are corrupt - last successfull backup from 01/09 - brilliant... So let's restore the database from backup(we tested backup/restore before we took the system into production...). Customer is using a third party backup solution. Restore of the first store runs smooth with no errors, database mounted. But NO(!) logfiles are replayed - just like a point in time restore! Hmmm...what the heck...let's try to rename the Checkpoint and then trigger a soft recovery - nothing! The system replayed only the logfiles from the backuptape - acts like a recovery storage group. Does the backup solution "belive" that there's a RSG? The story continues...tomorrow. See ya!

I did it!

I finally started my own blog - after thinking about it for months...

So i hope you'll enjoy my irregularly updated blog!