Hi,

i have all virtual machine on windows 2012R2.In my network i'have 2 exchange 2013 cu8 with DAG.

I do a backup of all VM so i need to backup Exchange server and purge Log.

Is it possible without any other backup software?

Best Regards.

Use windows back feature to back up exchange database. Perform full back to purge the log files

• Proposed as answer by Vishwanath.S 19 hours 10 minutes ago

Vishwanath is correct, i.e. a regular backup of the VM's will NOT properly backup nor purge the logs of an Exchange server.  To accomplish this you must do an Exchange Aware Backup which some products that backup VM's have, however if that is not possible then you must backup Exchange via an Exchange Aware Backup Service separately

Depending on what your backup/restore requirements are, you could enable circular logging. The downside there is that you can only recover data contained in your backup, so if you backup at midnight and you have a total failure at 6am, any emails that came in from midnight to 6am would be lost. With multiple servers though, that is not as much of an issue with the DAG redundancy.

Agreed that's a possible solution, HOWEVER if you are not doing an Exchange Aware Backup and instead just snapshotting the VM's you could very likely end up in a state where the DB's may not load backup post restore.  So just be sure that you can handle that situation which would more than likely require you to do a /P to bring it back into a consistent state and could end up causing some data loss

And MS does not support Exchange VM Snapshots.

Best to use backup software like DPM, ArcServe etc. that will flush your logs properly.

You also cannot run backups and have circular logging enabled.

Use windows back feature to back up exchange database. Perform full back to purge the log files

• Proposed as answer by Vishwanath.S Friday, July 31, 2015 12:17 PM

Use windows back feature to back up exchange database. Perform full back to purge the log files

• Proposed as answer by Vishwanath.S Friday, July 31, 2015 12:17 PM

Thanks for reply,

is possible use vss to purge log?

1. VSS to just clear the logs? No that's not possible nor advisable
2. VSS to backup and clear committed logs?  Yes you could use Windows Server Backup which uses VSS to do a backup and as part of that backup (if successful) it will clear all logs that have been committed to the DB  More info below

• https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Dd876851%28v=EXCHG.150%29.aspx
• http://exchangeserverpro.com/backup-exchange-server-2013-databases-using-windows-server-backup/