For years I’ve been using and administering Backup Exec. For nearly all that time I have not used the Exchange agent to it’s full capacity. At my last job we had always just backed up the entire database, and not had it set to be able to do mailbox level restores. Why? I think originally, some time long ago, it was really slow to do those types of backups and I wasn’t the one in charge at that time.
Jump forward almost a decade and I’m now at a new company. I have just setup our new Backup Exec 2010 R2 server, and I decided to see what the performance was with the Granular Restore Technology (GRT) turned on. We have a modest Exchange database at about 27gb with about 40 mailboxes. Not really knowing what to expect I was happy to see that the whole job ran in 24minutes to our LTO4 drive. Not too shabby, and now I can select individual mailboxes, or even specific folders/messages to restore if I needed to! Obviously this time to backup will increase, but I think I can handle it for the foreseeable future.