Worst Practice #5: Schedule backups and system maintenance during peak usage

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Worst Practice #5: Schedule backups and system maintenance during peak usage

David Sengupta
One of the areas that organizations frequently ignore is the overlap between resource-intensive processes affecting Exchange. I have often seen companies let their nightly backups spill over into the "morning rush" of people arriving at work and logging on to check e-mail, and then wonder why "e-mail is slow."

You need to explicitly understand how long your nightly backups are running on all of your Exchange servers. I recommend keeping track of backup windows for all your servers in whatever mechanism you prefer (i.e., Excel, Word, Visio, etc.), and then also tracking when your nightly Exchange server maintenance is running.

You should also document periods of "peak usage."

You can then review your records and tune your Exchange backups and system maintenance intervals accordingly,

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so they are offset from one another and from your periods of peak usage -- preferably during times of "low usage."


Top 10 Exchange performance worst practices

 Home: Introduction
 #1: Treat "high availability" as a future project
 #2: Leave "IOPS" for the consultant
 #3: Use identical configuration for all Exchange Server roles
 #4: Encourage users to keep everything in their Inboxes
 #5: Schedule backups and system maintenance during peak usage
 #6: Throttle the RAM available to Exchange
 #7: Virus scan and back up the M drive
 #8: Ignore client configuration, type and usage
 #9: Don't use change control
 #10: Ignore management tools

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:   
David Sengupta, Exchange expert
David Sengupta is a Product Manager in the Windows Management group at Quest Software. He has also been a Microsoft MVP in the Exchange Server category for six consecutive years. Sengupta has contributed to various Exchange and Windows books, magazines and white papers from a number of publishers. He also frequently represents Microsoft on staff at Ask the Experts, Microsoft Experts Area and Peer Talk at conferences such as MEC and TechEd. David has an M.T.S. from Tyndale Seminary, Canada, a B.Sc. from University of Ottawa, Canada and MCSE (Messaging) and CCA certifications. David runs a blog on Microsoft Exchange and e-mail compliance issues at http://p0stmaster.blogspot.com and can be reached at mailman@quest.com.
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