Exchange such a bitch to backup

[shiyan]

I am not gonna use exchange any more for my parents' office.

It is too damn sensitive to hardware changes and a bitch to backup.

I might end up losing 4 hours worth of emails (maybe something like 10~20 emails, no biggie but annoying), after moving all the data of the company server off a IBM Deathstar 75GXP mirror over to a mirror of Barracuda 4's.

Annoying database system.

[shiyan]

Most of the time, when I copy all the files of a working system off one hard drive to another, the system does not really notice the difference. This works with 2000 as well as XP. Edit: NO, THIS DOES NOT WORK WITH 2000. I remembered wrongly.

But with 2000 Server + Exchange this does not seem to be the case at all. Very annoying.

[Ruben]

You know that 2000 marries it's self to a drive, and a lot of times it does not like the move of drives, I have removed a drive in 2K and it always told me that drive was offline I had to reinstall the drive and use the remove wizard to uninstall the drive, and that fied my problem, I have had luck ghosting 2K then ghostng it back on the new drive with no problems. boy are you right about exchange, its a real bitch and don't try to upgrade it. but it does work sweet.

[ThePerfectCore]

2000 does notice when I swap HDDs. I went from a 6GB to my 80GB, just for kicks. I copied it over, defragged, tuned, tweaked, etc. but 2000 still chugged during startup.

XP has the same problem.

[shiyan]

Originally posted by Ruben
You know that 2000 marries it's self to a drive, and a lot of times it does not like the move of drives, I have removed a drive in 2K and it always told me that drive was offline I had to reinstall the drive and use the remove wizard to uninstall the drive, and that fied my problem, I have had luck ghosting 2K then ghostng it back on the new drive with no problems. boy are you right about exchange, its a real bitch and don't try to upgrade it. but it does work sweet.

now that I think of it, you are right, it only seems to work wit XP, not 2000. I do remember 2000 Pro not being happy with its files copied from one disk to another. A disk to disk or image restore is required.

As long as you leave it be, 2000 Server and 2000 Exchange are quite stable and nice, although startup time is long. But migrating from hard drive to hard drive really do have to be done with a lot of care.

slow startup is not such a concern as I leave the server running continiously, rebooting every few weeks.

I did manage to fix my problem. What I did was restore an image of the server made a few hours before, but replacing the few hours old exchange folder under program files with the up to date exchange folder.

Quite relieved.

I need to look into not using Exchange, or knowing how to back up things better.

[shiyan]

Originally posted by ThePerfectCore
2000 does notice when I swap HDDs. I went from a 6GB to my 80GB, just for kicks. I copied it over, defragged, tuned, tweaked, etc. but 2000 still chugged during startup.

XP has the same problem.

Really? I do remember this about 2000, but XP did not seem to mind.... hmmm, got to try it a few more times to make sure.

[ThePerfectCore]

I only did it with XP Home, I dunno about XP Pro. :p

[RED Hot Machine]

I've upgraded HD's with With windows 2000, using norton Ghost.
Went across without a single problem, might be a solution to your problem aswell.

[shiyan]

yeah, Disk Image, which is similar to Ghost, also seems to do it with no problems for me.

only thing was, I was being lazy this time, and did not use Disk Image. there was some data already on the target drive, and I did not want to bother moving it off first, then transferring it back on.

Bad decision, as it ended up costing me quite a few hours more.

man, I could have saved myself so much trouble. I could have used the Disk to Disk function.

[KaHNZa]

Just a reminder, swearing in titles is not allowed. ;)

[shiyan]

sorry about that, won't happen again.