In the past, I’ve run tests to see how Rsync performs against an NTBackup backup of Exchange Server – see Slide 15 of my Rsync PowerPoint presentation.

However, since our recent release of v5.2.2 of BackupAssist, we can Rsync the underlying edb files instead (Exchange 2007). See my Rsync VSS Applications blog entry for instructions.

How does Rsync perform with the underlying edb files?

It turns out that the results are even better – Rsync was able to match nearly 100% of the existing edb file, and able to transfer just the differences. And with compression, the amount of data sent across the wire was actually less than the growth on the filesystem!

Here are the raw results.

For example, on day 5:

• 10.1 MB was added to the Exchange server database
• 7.6 MB was sent across the wire
• The overall size of the Information Store was 844.5 MB
• After the backup, and after the logs were pruned, the size of the Information Store fell to 823.5 MB.

* This was tested on a 100Mbps network. The majority of the time taken as performing the VSS snapshot (1 minute 11 sec) and performing the Exchange Consistency Check (20 sec).

Now that we’ve tested this in our lab, we’re next going to build up a much bigger Information Store and test it over a slow Internet link. Hopefully we’ll have some results within a few weeks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 at 4:27 am and is filed under Support. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.