Customer letter — Thank you, DPM !!!

Here is an email that I received from a DPM early adopter which was just too cool not to share.  This customer has a distributed-infrastructure, is mid-market sized, and is using DPM 2007 beta 2 to protect Exchange 2007 SP1 beta (partipating in two Microsoft early adopter TAP/RDP programs – in production).

Any administrator who has ever had that “Oh Crud” moment when they clicked on a change and realized that something really bad is now occurring will empathize.  Your gut tightens up and everything moves in slow motion as you cry out “Nooooooooooooooo”.  But its too late.  Hope you enjoy the letter…

Hi all – Just wanted to extend a big THANK YOU & JOB WELL DONE for the current DPM bits working with Exchange 2007 SP1 beta.

In getting ready to remove my last Exchange 2003 server, I inadvertently removed Exchange attributes from 5 active accounts earlier this evening (VIPs, naturally). Of course, once I’d done this faux pas I then had 5 users whose email and UM voicemail had vanished.

 

After several attempts at reconnecting the accounts to their mailboxes (all of which failed since Exchange attributes were toast…) – I set up a Recovery Storage Group on my mailbox server, used DPM to restore a recent backup to the RSG (the last recovery point on disk was less than an hour before I’d waved my stupid wand…), created new mailboxes for the already-existing accounts, and merged the contents of each back in.

 

The end result is that what could have been a major disaster with an all-night recovery process turned into just a couple hours of work (that was good to go through anyway) – and the only reason it was a couple of hours is that the 5 mailboxes were in 5 different SG’s.

 

It only took DPM 10-15 minutes to restore each database (about 15 GB ea); each DB restored & mounted without a hitch.  Then I used the Exchange tools to merge the mailbox contents; and had about 5 minutes of “cleanup” to do for each one. 

 

The end result: all 5 mailboxes are back to their original state – and the only thing the users will have to do in the morning is re-record their UM greetings.

 

So… DPM has saved me and I can now go home instead of working all night J

 

THANKS <with sigh of relief>… DPM rocks!!!

<Marketing disclaimer> your mileage will vary, recovery methods vary based on topology and workload, not valid in timbuktu <end Marketing disclaimer>

On a sincere note, if I ever doubted coming to Microsoft almost two years ago to help bring DPM 2007 to market … this kind of story nails it for me. 

Thanks to the submitter – you know who you are … and if you have similar success stories with DPM, we’d love to hear them.

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