Hi

> When I worked with exchange 5.5, I used both Veritas and ARCServe

products.

> In both these cases you needed to purchase the additional agents for

exchange.

> Exchange has numerous services which go to make up the entire suite and

the agent negotiated with each one in turn, depending on their dependencies,
and stopped the service, ...

If you had used Mircosoft Windows Backup, you didn't have to stop all
services. As I said, the backup components of Exchange, which are integrated
into NTBACKUP upon installation of exchange admin tools, are ONLINE BACKUP
TOOLS.

> You're still talking about having to copy the file. Cloning automatically

is nothing more than copying... no? This copying is triggered by something
and this something is usually the timestamp changing when the fb server has
gained access. The shadow service is watching for this trigger. So FB
connects, shadow kicks in and starts copying.
on small databases, this "short time" is tolerable or not noticeable. For 3
Gb files, this time is long enough even on fast disks to cause FB to throw
an exception due to lack of access to the file.

I don't know how it works, but I did use volume shadow copies with very
large files (about 4,2 GB) and there was NO delay. Maybe it only copies the
parts that are to be changed upon access, instead of all the file
beforehand, I don't know. But it works.

> You're right - I don't know the exact nature of shadow but if it's copying

a live db, I don;t lie it and wouldn't recommend it. It can do what it likes
to word documents.

I am still trying to understand what the problem could be?

> errm - I don't suppose you are referring to the FB server shadow function

are you? that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about Disk Shadowing
in the Server2003 OS.

Right, I am talking about the VOLUME SHADOW COPY SERVICE of WINDWS 2003. In
my Windows services list (German) this is called "Volumeschattenkopie".

Regards,
Steffen