HP 7450 Application Software Suite Microsoft Exchange Media LTU manual Recovery Procedures

Advantages of Using Recovery Manager

Traditionally, databases are backed up to tape. Backing up to tape is a time-consuming task, especially if the database is growing rapidly. Recovery Manager offers the following advantages over traditional tape backup:

•Creating virtual copies of databases using Recovery Manager requires only seconds and can be accomplished via the click of the mouse through the Recovery Manager GUI, or by scheduling virtual copies either through Recovery Manager or via Windows’ automatic scheduled task application. For more information, see “Creating Virtual Copies of Storage Groups” (page 35) and “RMExch create” (page 56).

•With Recovery Manager’s optional policy settings, you can maintain a specified number of the latest virtual copies to stay online. These online virtual copies can then be mounted to the staging Exchange server for point-in-time recovery, thus eliminating the need to restore from tape, which can take hours.

•After the virtual copy has been mounted to the backup server, you can perform a backup to tape of the virtual copy using Recovery Manager.

•You can easily recover data using Recovery Manager's file copy and volume promote restore features.

NOTE: Backup to tape can be performed in one easy command with a quick backup. See “RMExch backup” (page 53).

Recovery Procedures

In many cases, the Exchange server is able to quietly recover when a server crashes and the contents of the database buffer in the memory are lost. Exchange automatically recovers when you start the information store after the failure using the checkpoint file to identify the oldest transaction not flushed to disk and then replaying log files forward. If the checkpoint file is missing, all the log files are scanned to determine whether any committed transactions have not been written to the database. At the end, the database is consistent and can start normally. Most of the time, recovering an email or a user's email is all that is needed. This can be done using the Recovery Storage Group.

Recovery Manager provides several options for a full storage group recovery if the Recovery Storage Group is not sufficient:

•Point-in-time recovery

•Volume promote point-in-time recovery

•Point-of-failure recovery

•Single mailbox recovery

Point-In-Time Recovery

Recovery procedures for LCR or CCR Exchange 2007 configurations should be run on the active copy of the database (the active node for CCR). Microsoft does not support restoring to the passive copy. Note that you must reseed the passive copy after a restore is performed on the active copy.

To perform a point-in-time recovery:

1.In the Exchange Management Console, right-click the desired database you want to recover and select Properties.

2.Under the General tab, select This database can be overwritten by a restore.

3.Click OK.

4.On the Database Management tab in the Exchange Management Console, right-click the storage group you want to recover and select Dismount Database.

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