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Yeah... I'm not the one who set it up. I've been tasked with setting up backups for their Exchange data. I've read through the documentation and learned about all the caveats that come with using the cheapo built-in backup solution, including that the entire volume must be backed up in order to make a consistent "application" backup of Exchange.

OK, so I selected the D:\ drive, which is where the DB and logs were. In an attempt to save space, I added two folder exclusions in the Advanced menu, one of which apparently contained the VHDs and associated files for live, running VMs. The backup ran successfully, the logs were replayed and truncated, and all appears to be well.

The next day I go to perform a test restore. On the restore type selection screen, Application is greyed out! Grrr...

1a. Does adding exclusions count against the "whole volume" requirement for an Exchange Application backup, or...

1b. Does the Hyper-V writer conflict with the Exchange writer?

  1. Is it possible to restore the backup that I made at the file level? If so, how?
Bigbio2002
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4 Answers4

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I don't think you are going to get a successful backup/restore.

If you want to host HyperV then it needs to be that exclusively, not with other applications on it. I am pretty sure this is an unsupported or at least untested configuration, so the answer to your questions will be nobody knows.

I would use this as a good excuse to get the environment redesigned, putting Exchange in to its own VM for example.

File level backup isn't going to work for Exchange, as that will result in an inconsistent database file, which will most likely result in a loss of data.

Sembee
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For 1a and 1b, I don't know.

For question 2, yes it's very easy :

The backup is stored in a VHD file. You can mount this file as a disk in Windows disk manager and access the content.

Then you can get the database file and restore it manually.

The tricky may part may be to access the vhd file, since by default you don't have permissions to access it, but it's quite easy to override.

The exact steps depends if you perform the backup on a dedicated drive on or a volume.

JFL
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I found out the problem. The presence of Hyper-V VMs on that partition was perhaps a poor design choice, but otherwise irrelevant. The key is selecting the entire drive, without selecting any file/folder exclusions, for it to qualify as a "volume" backup and be eligible to restore recognized "applications" from those volumes. Of course, the only catch is that everything on that volume gets backed up, whether it's related to the logical "application" or not.

So I moved the VMs elsewhere to reduce the size of the backup, selected the whole volume to back up, and voila!

Bigbio2002
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What about using "Previous Version" if you want to do it at "File Level"screenshot

VL Thlan
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