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Archive Bit Vs. Modified Time

With Backup Exec 10.0, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using Archive Bit vs. Modified Time for full and incremental backup, and do these options have any effect specifically to backing up Exchange Mailboxes.

I am concerned about the size of my backup jobs. The full backup of my mailboxes are 135 GB, and the incremental is 100 GB. Should I not be seeing much smaller backups for my incremental?

peakpeak

Assume that all data has changed, then the sizes would be almost equal, so if most of tha data has changed they're almost equal in size.
Full backup doesn't care for the file time or archive bit, it just copies the lot to the backup media.
Archive bit tells that the file has been modified since an undefined time in the past so BE will grab it to the backup. You have two options here, one to reset archive bit and one to keep it. If you reset it and the file is not changed at the time of the next incremental backup it will not be included. I believe that's the option you want.

File modification time will make BE compare the file time on disk with that on the backup media (takes longer)

Sembee

If you are backing up mailboxes instead of the information store then I am not surprised you are concerned about the backups.
However mailbox backups are close to useless for most disaster recovery scenarios. When it comes to Exchange I never do incremental backups, only full backups.

Simon.

peakpeak

sembee, backing up mailboxes? You mean the old brick level ?

Sembee

Brick level backup. When i see someone say mailboxes instead of information store that is what I tend to think of.

Simon.

peakpeak

OK, we don't use that anymore :)

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