Shadow protect was working fine along side backup exec then it stopped taking snapshots, I stopped and restarted the service appeared to fix it.  After that I started to get errors in my Backup Exec job log problems with the VSS.  Would really like to use ShadowProtect alongside backup exec to get the best of both.  Are their any known problems with backup exec 11d running alongside Shadow Protect 3.0? 

I strongly recommend that you do not run Backup Exec System Recovery (BESR) along side ShadowProtect.

I also recommend that you run Backup Exec by itself, with no other backup products installed, and then perform some very rigorous tests so that you can see for yourself what Backup Exec does to your data.  And, if you actually do these test, and you don't mind sharing your results, then please report the results here as I'm sure everyone will find them to be very interesting.

Here's the test I suggest you perform:

1) First set up a test Exchange Server on a clean Windows Server installation with no 3rd party apps installed.  Test its database to ensure that it's not corrupt.
2) Install one of the backup products you wish to test (Backup Exec, in this case).  Configure it to generate incremental backups of the volume that contains your Exchange database every fifteen minutes
3) Next use LoadSim to place massive load on the Exchange server.
4) Let it run for a few hours.  Does the product even allow you to backup Exchange like this without taking Exchange down altogether?  It's an important question and one with an interesting answer.  Can your business afford to take down its email server?
5) Stop LoadSim.  Stop the backups.  Stop Exchange.
6) Before restoring Exchange, test it to see if the original database (not the backup) is still good (not corrupt).
7) With each incremental, in turn, restore it, then test the Exchange database for corruption.  Was the Incremental that you just restored basically useless (your Exchange database is corrupt after the restore)?

NOTE: If you are performing the above sequence of tests on the Small Business Server edition of Windows Server 2003, then you must enable the Exchange VSS writer (as it's disabled by default on SBS) prior to running these tests.  For more information see:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;Q838183

If you're running Server 2003 SP1 then you should also contact Microsoft and obtain and apply this VSS hotfix:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/923628
 

 I really don't have time to do those tests at the moment, what would you suggest I use instead of Backup Exec to backup to tape?  Second I use backup exec to backup my SBS2003 server Exchange/SQL and SharePoint as well as another windows server remotely so I would need those capabilities along with backing up to tape as well.  Backup to tape is my off site rotation by the way.    One of the reasons I am looking at your product is the P2V capabilities, I am building a server to install VMWare on this month to start building some non critical servers and learn VMWare in my Small Business environment.  Thought Storage Craft would make a good redundant backup if my physical server went down I would be able to restore to my virtual environment.  I have 6 total servers only two are mission critical servers one being my SBS 2003 server. 

Side note I find it amusing a lot of vendors not Storage Craft but others mention small business as important yet they really don't price products in the Small Business price range.

I don't have much experience with tape.  Can any other users provide experience/suggestions to vbuckjr on spooling ShadowProtect backup images to tape?

We are in the process of migrating our SBS clients soley to ShadowProtect.

We had a number of tape based BackupExec clients that were a real hassle to recover with. Try recovering 600GB + SBS Server + SQL + WSS + Exchange from tape via Veritas. It was extremely painful and it was a struggle to get it to recover from the original two tape libraries.

We now provide an off-site rotation service for our clients via the ShadowProtect backup to USB disk using the 128 bit or 256 bit AES encryption on the images.

Yes, BackupExec and ShadowProtect will conflict because the way they interface with the Volume Shadow Copy services in my experience.

My suggestion, if you are amicable to it, is to drop Veritas/Symantec like a rock and run with ShadowProtect.

Philip

MPECS Inc.

Microsoft Small Business Specialists

Would like to be able to supplement with tape so I can have multiple versions to restore is their a tape backup program that will work next to ShadowProtect?

 So you are able to restore Exchange brick level and SQL utilizing ShadowProtect only?

USB Hard drives are cheap.

We have 6 month and 12 month grandfather drives. They are stored in a separate place and are a different colour so as to not get accidentally placed back into the rotation.

Believe me, tape is more trouble than it is worth.

If you have a need for grandfathering the data, then do so with the USB hard drives. You can mount the old ShadowProtect image - much like Ghost can do with their images - and pull any data you need in minutes versus the hours it takes to sort through tapes and get yourself to the right spot on the right tape to get the right version of the file you are looking for.

Philip

My  two suggestions to you are as follows.

1. Use a program called Backup Assist to interface to NTBackup to deal with tapes, You can get it from www.backupassist.com .

2. You could also use the original interface to NTBackup and schedule backups from your image repository to tape, but can get a bit messy with tape nameing etc.

Finally which ever you use please do not schedule at the same time as ShadowProtect image backups as VSS will have a major dummy spit and the backups will fail.