Backup Exec 2012 – One time Exchange Backup doesnt flush transaction logs

I have spent the last few days trying to understand why a successful one time backup hadn’t flushed the transaction logs on my client’s Exchange 2010 server. We spent a lot of time troubleshooting message queues and looking for a transaction that hadn’t completed as the Backup job had reported successful. Digging a bit deeper into some of the job logs I can see that the one-time backup was doing a COPY – Full database and logs and not a FULL – database and flush committed logs.

Googling this came up with the following technote: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH187838 and there is no way that you can change the option to do a full log flush in the one time backup.

I can’t fathom why this wouldn’t be a useful feature of the software to at least have the flush committed logs as a tickbox in the job options for the one-time backup.

Backup Exec 12.5 DFS File Restores

I thought that this deserves a special mention.

Backup Exec backs up the DFSr Replicated Folders using the shadow copy components and in the past to perform a restore you were unable to redirect the files to an alternate location. This could cause issues if you wanted to keep both versions of the file as Backup Exec would overwrite the file and then perform an inital replication of that DFSr folder to the other servers in its replication group.

Whilst you could also perform an Authoritative restore of the DFSr folder this has recently caused me even more issues which resulted in support calls to Symantec and Microsoft to follow up on why this happens and what state my DFS is now in as a result of these restores.

During the inital support call to Symantec they advised me that for the first time in Backup Exec you can redirect the files you restore from the Volume Shadow Copy of the DFSr folders. Simply select the server and location in the File Redirection tab in Backup Exec and you will be able to dump the folder structure to whereever you want it and then copy the relevant files back into your DFS structure as you want it.