Hi

I am currently writing an updated Disaster Recovery plan and have finally got to deploying ShadowProtect on my Exchange system after using it for 8 months on 6 other production servers. Unfortunatley there is not a great deal written on Exchange 2007 plus Shadow Protect in the forums yet, and I am keen to get it right!

Current backup situation is a nightly full backup with HP Data Protect to LTO4 tape for offsite. This deals with transaction log truncation etc fine. However, limited by potential loss of data of up to 24 hours.

I understand that if I deploy ShadowProtect with full snapshot once a week and 2 hourly incrementals during business hours this will give me at worst, 2 hours of lost data.

Some questions and comments;

• I still want offsite backup to tape, and also want to continue to backup the information store using Data Protect. Call it paranoi, or piece of mind or just a 2nd level of backup. How can I integrate a VSS aware Data Protect with a VSS aware ShadowProtect, both of which by default truncate transaction logs. It would lead to an incomplete log collection on the production server
• What is the impact on end users of hourly ShadowProtect snapshots. Current server load has approxinmatley 150-200 concurrent users.
• In the event of catastrophic failure the restore path at this point for a DR plan is to move the ShadowProtect image to an ESX server I am running in my DR room. Of course, I do need to get it to a 64bit host for Exchange :-( 
• What other issues do I need to consider?

thanks
Michael

Some random notes below.

Might be best to choose either SP or Data Protect rather than trying to run both on the same machine.

If you are backing up Exchange:

1.      Install latest OS updates (some contain VSS-related fixes)

2.      Make sure that the Exchange VSS writer is enabled
By default, SBS does not have this provider enabled (see below).

3.      Install the Microsoft hotfix for SQL Server 2000/2005 VSS writer, if required:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934396/en-us

4.      Create ShadowProtect backup job and specify “Use VSS for all backups”*
When configuring the backup job, make sure you select “Use VSS” on the Schedule page of the backup wizard. This will avoid getting the Exchange database in a “dirty” state.

5.      Backup both the *.edb and log files in a single backup job
These files may be on different directories or volumes – that doesn’t matter.
Backing up all files in a single backup job will ensure that all the data is consistent.