Wife's Exchange at School Gone!

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fluidimagery

Weaksauce
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Aug 9, 2004
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About a week ago my wife wasn't able to log into her OWA site to retrieve her mail. It was down for about 3 days until the site came back up but with a blank exchange database. IT at the school said all mail was lost and can't be retreived. The school supposedly has a mandated archive server but the mail is not seperated by mailbox and is instead one giant mailbox. We deal with a lot of small businesses running SBS but I don't have really any experience in a 500+ mailbox exchange server but I'd imagine the principle's are the same regarding backup. Just amazes me. I haven't gotten any details on what actually happened and why no backup, but feel horrible for everyone at the school with years and years of email toast. Part of me wants to see if we can step in and try and help but the other part doesn't want to get involved...
 
That's absurd. They should have monthly full backups of the infostore to tape, at least.
 
I'd suspect a case of laziness as the culprit. Whether the admin was too lazy to create proper backups, or too lazy to restore them- The jury's still out. :rolleyes:
 
Someone is getting fired over that one... Were I faculty or an administrator, I'd want blood. No excuse for that at all.

Out of curiosity, Do you know/remember what version of OWA it was? 2003, 2k7, 2010?
 
Sounds like there was no method in place for backup, or....the backup wasn't working and they weren't checking.
 
lazy admins, period.

for either not setting up or checking as other said, go for blood.
 
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I'de say budget. I've seen to many admin not do backups because they had no software to do it with or no hardware.
 
ben chi(f4) said:
I smell budget issue.
Click to expand...

Most schools are in a crunch right now, and depending on what state, even more so now. Chances are they couldnt afford to get a proper backup system in place, OR the IT admin in charge decided it wasnt necissary.

Its unfortunate, but alot of schools are actually backupless.

Where I work, this school has 2 backup plans for e-mail alone. And with alot of schools getting on the Virtual Server bandwagon, its easier to create more backups instead of reverting to the old style Cluster servers which were very expensive.
 
Who cares about IT budget? Quality personnel, backup solutions? PSHAW We need more administrative positions at the school district head quarters.
 
Even if you don't have a budget for decent software, there is still windows backup and cheap USB drives. There is no excuse to not have a backup. That is just plain negligence and/or stupidity.
 
Captain Colonoscopy said:
Even if you don't have a budget for decent software, there is still windows backup and cheap USB drives. There is no excuse to not have a backup. That is just plain negligence and/or stupidity.
Click to expand...

Yeah, exactly. One can stop all exchange services and back it up to tape or at least another disk if there's no money for a real backup solution.
 
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Ditto. If they didn't have a fire/tornado/hurricane/Godzilla strike, then there's no excuse for not having at least a network backup. And a tested one at that!
 
This is a management problem, not a tech problem.

Schools have audits, the audit will include discussions about the backup methods, including the need for offsite backup.

So what probably happened here is this...

1. Existing backup solution fails or is no longer sufficient for their needs.

2. Techs make recommendation for replacement, which management ignores.

3. go back to 2

You can argue that the techs should have cobbled something together with USB drives, to at least get a temporary backup. This is exactly the wrong answer. In the minds of the management, the problem would then be "solved" for $200. They'll wonder why anyone even proposed the original $$$ solution.

Remember, IT is seen by management as a cost center. It is very difficult to measure monetary value added by IT, but simple to measure cost. If you make it a habit of implementing poor solutions to the problems, eventually you're entire network will consist of crap. At that point, you'll tell management that you've built their entire network into crap and needs to be replaced at a cost of $$$$$$. How well do you think that'll go over?
 
jjeff1 said:
This is a management problem, not a tech problem.

Schools have audits, the audit will include discussions about the backup methods, including the need for offsite backup.

So what probably happened here is this...

1. Existing backup solution fails or is no longer sufficient for their needs.

2. Techs make recommendation for replacement, which management ignores.

3. go back to 2

You can argue that the techs should have cobbled something together with USB drives, to at least get a temporary backup. This is exactly the wrong answer. In the minds of the management, the problem would then be "solved" for $200. They'll wonder why anyone even proposed the original $$$ solution.

Remember, IT is seen by management as a cost center. It is very difficult to measure monetary value added by IT, but simple to measure cost. If you make it a habit of implementing poor solutions to the problems, eventually you're entire network will consist of crap. At that point, you'll tell management that you've built their entire network into crap and needs to be replaced at a cost of $$$$$$. How well do you think that'll go over?
Click to expand...

You make some good points. However, the management POV does have some merit. I'm sure that you'll agree that from just before the Dot-Com debacle to today there are WAY to many "professionals" that don't really get it, and or just attempt to justify their own department/job. That mentality is not what IT is about. IT, itself is not a self-sustaining industry. IT serves a purpose, and that is technically supporting other business ventures. It doesn't matter if it's providing a technical solution to B&M Retail sales, an eCommerce Website to promote/facilitate retail sales, or a solution to conduct trades faster, etc. It's about enabling the rest of Business/Hobby/Politics to run more efficiently. We all know someone or multiple IT people that buy for the sake of a new toy, or to fill out a budget rather than a specific need or blow projects way deeper than they need to be. I'm not saying all are like that, but it is a fine line between budgetary numbers and "best practices".

Edit: And for the record, I'm in the trenches as a consultant. I normally get called in the clean up the mess, and I've seen both sides to the argument. It's not always one-sided, in either direction.
 
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if the drives were pulled out immediately, might have been able to recover the disks' data and rebuild exchange database
 
Budget isn't an excuse for a school. When techsoup.org donates backup exec to schools for NOTHING they should have that.

I also am the IT director at my work which is a school itself. We are on a budget but the biggest part of that budget is for backup purposes. When I started here 5 years ago, they had regular desktops as servers and they had Exchange 2003 and it was backing up to another DC controller as their only backup solution but as a export of the database with Windows backp, and into one big file. You couldn't restore individual databases/mail/etc this way.

So after much redo, and as of today, we now have Exchange 2010 Enterprise, and run Backup Exec to an external RAID 5 system and two external portable HD's rotated weekly for offsite backups which allows us to backup the whole database but we can restore all the way down to each individual email itself per user. We also now have 6 Dell Poweredge servers and new Adtran switches all over the network to support our new VOIP phone system we also put in after a dated Digital system they had fro Meredian. Obviously whoever was running their IT systems didn't know what they were doing.

You can't put a price on backups. You NEED THEM.
 
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