Backup Exec 2010: Archiving Options

Much of the content produced in companies now consists of email, documents, presentations, and other types of unstructured information. This explosion of information has a significant impact on storage spending—as well as on IT’s ability to meet the needs of its internal customers and business units—and it can lead to the use of any number of disparate tools just to protect applications and keep them running.

Symantec's archiving and backup information management solutions are engineered to support today’s most common Microsoft® environments. Unlike typical solutions focused only at the application level, Symantec archiving and backup solutions address the total data infrastructure (applications, servers, and networks) in order to unify content sources, apply retention policies, reduce backup windows, shorten recovery times, and optimize storage resources. Symantec makes it easier for companies of all sizes to store, manage, protect, and discover Exchange® and Windows® file servers, with Backup Exec’s new Archiving Options, powered by market-leading Symantec Enterprise Vault.

What is Archiving?

What is Archiving? According to Answers.com, archiving means: “To compress one or more files and folders into a single file for backup or transport…. "Archive" implies data retention, and archived data are typically stored in a secondary location for backup and historical purposes.” PC Magazine defines email archiving in the following way: “Retaining e-mail messages for historical purposes or to be in compliance with industry regulations…”

Backup Exec’s Archiving Options offer features that closely resemble these definitions. Archiving is a way of moving data from a “Content Source” – in Backup Exec’s case, an Exchange Mailbox or a Windows File Server with File Shares – to more cost-effective storage for long-term retention. This activity has useful benefits for the content source. Generally, Exchange Servers or Windows File Servers often use expensive “Primary Storage”, that is, storage arrays that provide a
high level of performance for the applications those arrays are serving. Over time, as old data is maintained in Exchange Mailboxes or user shares on File Servers, the sheer mass of this older, infrequently-accessed data can force Administrators to spend a significant amount of money to increase the size of this Primary Storage. However, there are reliable, costeffective arrays on the market. While Exchange administrators wouldn’t want to use these arrays in place of fast primary
Fibre Channel or SAS storage, why not move this old data out of the Exchange Server and store it on those cost-effective SATA-based arrays? This is the question that archiving solves – it gives Administrators a way to clear out the older and infrequently-access pieces of data that make it seem like Exchange servers or File Servers are ever-expanding data storage locations. Administrator can apply data lifecycle policies to this data so that an orderly removal of archived data takes place.

This storage management function is at the core of the Backup Exec 2010 Archiving Options. Archiving moves data from expensive storage to slower, cheaper storage, allowing Exchange Servers and File Servers to be repositories of the newest and most frequently accessed data. A number of other benefits – faster backups, deduplicated storage of archived items, data retention policies, self-service recovery of end-user data, and others – are also included with Backup Exec’s Archiving Options.

Benefits of Archiving

Archiving is critical to maintaining application size, performance, and scalability. Keeping old, infrequently accessed, and redundant data on Exchange or File Server primary storage not only wastes precious space, but it also costs time and money to manage, maintain, and back up the data. If these content sources used less storage, Administrators would see immediate improvements in backup times and a reduction in the amount of backup data stored to tape or disk. The Backup Exec Archiving Option enables administrators to reclaim primary storage space, enable retention policies, and maintain end-user access to archived files.

Backup Exec’s Archive Option also allows Administrators to move older, less frequently accessed data from expensive primary storage to more cost-effective disk storage, while allowing end users to access their archived email and data using Backup Exec Retrieve, a Web-based Recovery portal for archived files, folders, and emails. Archiving can deduplicate and compress data while storing a single copy of a file or message in the archive, regardless of the number of times it is
archived—or where it was originally from. Lastly, Archiving can apply retention policies for data, allowing storageoptimized copies of data to be kept for months or years in compliance with record retention rules.

Backup Exec 2010’s Archiving Architecture

The Backup Exec Archive Option allows the creation of Vaults, which are special repositories of archived data. The Vault is a disk storage location that can be locally attached to a media server or hosted on a SAN or iSCSI volume. The Vault stores this archived data and performs additional actions on this data. First, for storage management purposes, the Vault has a deduplication function that optimizes data stored in it. Second, the Vault performs content indexing against data stored in it. Through context indexing, the Vault provides end users and administrators the ability to perform searches against the data it contains, using search criteria such as file names, paths, or keywords.

The Archiving architecture requires four necessary items and one optional (if highly recommended) item. The first is a Backup Exec 2010 Media Server – this is where the where the Exchange Mailbox or File System Archive Options are installed, configured, and managed. The second is the creation of a Vault via the Backup Exec Administration Console’s Devices tab or the Vault Creation Wizard. The third is the ability to do Backups of “Content Sources”, that is, the Exchange Server or Windows File Server that Administrators want to Archive data from. Whether archiving data from an Exchange server or Windows File Server, a remote agent must be installed on the content source: the Remote Agent for Exchange (in the case of Exchange Mailbox Archiving) or the Remote Agent for Windows Servers (in the case of File System Archiving). The fourth item is an Archive Job. An Archive Job is a new type of job in Backup Exec 2010 that compares archive criteria (size, age, or size + age) against data in Exchange Mailboxes (for Exchange Mailbox Archiving) or network (for File System Archiving) that have been backed up. If it finds a match, the Archive Job will copy the data from the backup set into the Vault. After the data is safely in the Vault, the Archive Job will delete the matching item from the Exchange Server or File Server.

The optional-yet-recommended item mentioned above is Backup Exec Retrieve. The Backup Exec Retrieve console is included with Backup Exec 2010 at no charge. Backup Exec Retrieve is a separately installed piece of software, installed on the Media Server or a separate Web Server, and integrated with Microsoft’s Internet Information Server, or IIS. Backup Backup Exec 2010: Archiving Options Exec Retrieve is accessed via a Web Browser and allows both Administrators and End-Users the ability to recover Archived data.

Requirements for Backup Exec 2010’s Archiving Options

General Media Server System Requirements

• The Backup Exec Media Server must have at least 1 GB of physical memory installed on it.
• The Backup Exec Media Server should have at least 1 dual-core processor

Exchange Mailbox Archiving General Requirements
The Backup Exec Exchange Mailbox Archiving Option supports Archiving from the following versions of Exchange:

• Exchange 2007
• Exchange 2003

The Backup Exec Media Server and the Microsoft Exchange Server must have several additional components installed and configured to enable Exchange Mailbox Archiving. These components are detailed below:

• Microsoft Outlook 2007 or higher must be installed on the media server before you install the Archiving Option.

When you install Outlook on the media server, you must create a profile and connect to an Exchange Server mailbox. Outlook may display an error message about a conflicting program. If Outlook offers to fix the problem, choose to do so, and then follow the instructions that are given by Outlook.

• The Exchange Server backups must have the Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) option enabled.
• Exchange Server backups must be on one of the following devices:

◦ Non-removable backup-to-disk folder
◦ Deduplication storage folder
◦ A storage array in a Storage Provisioning Option environment

• Archive jobs must have a valid path configured on an NTFS volume that is local to the media server for temporary storage of data. The default path is set to use C:\temp.

• A specific mailbox for use by the Archive Option (sometimes referred to as a ‘system’ mailbox) must be configured for exclusive use by Backup Exec on each Exchange Server on which you want to select mailboxes for archiving. Whenever you create an archive job for the Exchange Mailbox Archiving Option you are prompted to enter the name of this ‘system’ mailbox.The following are restrictions for this mailbox:

◦ The mailbox must not be used for any other purpose; the Exchange Mailbox Archiving Option requires exclusive access.
◦ The mailbox must not be hidden from address lists.
◦ The mailbox account must not be disabled.

• The media server domain and the Exchange Server domains must trust the domain that the Backup Exec service account belongs to.
• The media server domain must trust the domains that contain the accounts of users whose mailboxes reside on the Exchange Servers.
• You must grant permissions to the Backup Exec service account to the Exchange servers. Refer to the Backup Exec Admin guide for instructions regarding specific permissions.
• The Backup Exec service account must be a member of the Active Directory domain. Symantec recommends that you use a Backup Exec service account that has domain and local administrator rights on the Exchange Server. You should not make the Backup Exec service account a domain administrator.

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