Exmerge Scheduled Task crashing

[adamf]

We have a scheduled task that is set to run Exmerge and backup eveyr exchange mailbox into a PST and then our backup software backs up all the PST files.

Up until Saturday it was running fine and now I've noticed that it hasn't been running. The schedule task is ending with a last result code of 0xc0000005 and the following is being logged in the event logs:

Event Type:	Error
Event Source:	Application Error
Event Category:	(100)
Event ID:	1000
Date:		27/11/2008
Time:		21:18:54
User:		N/A
Computer:	RHEXCHG
Description:
Faulting application ExMerge.exe, version 6.5.7529.0, faulting module msvcrt.dll, version 7.0.3790.3959, fault address 0x00037673.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 41 70 70 6c 69 63 61 74   Applicat
0008: 69 6f 6e 20 46 61 69 6c   ion Fail
0010: 75 72 65 20 20 45 78 4d   ure  ExM
0018: 65 72 67 65 2e 65 78 65   erge.exe
0020: 20 36 2e 35 2e 37 35 32    6.5.752
0028: 39 2e 30 20 69 6e 20 6d   9.0 in m
0030: 73 76 63 72 74 2e 64 6c   svcrt.dl
0038: 6c 20 37 2e 30 2e 33 37   l 7.0.37
0040: 39 30 2e 33 39 35 39 20   90.3959 
0048: 61 74 20 6f 66 66 73 65   at offse
0050: 74 20 30 30 30 33 37 36   t 000376
0058: 37 33                     73

When I run the exmerge application and follow through the wizard it works fine, but running from a batch file with various switches it doesn't.

The only thing that has changed on the server was I installed some Windows PowerShell stuff so I can query mailbox sizes and other exchange atrributes - i've uninstalled that, restarted and still it will not have it.

Any ideas

[Michael]

Try making an exception in DEP for ExMerge.exe.

[zag]

Cant help with your problem but just out of interest, how would you restore these mailboxes?

It seems an interesting way of backing up exchange and could be quite useful if individual mailboxes and messages could be restored.

[srochford]

Cant help with your problem but just out of interest, how would you restore these mailboxes?

It seems an interesting way of backing up exchange and could be quite useful if individual mailboxes and messages could be restored.

exmerge works both ways - you can bulk export to PST and bulk import to the Exchange store.

I wouldn't use this as a sole backup mechanism (it's horribly slow and you can get huge backups because you lose single instance storage) but it is good for "belt and braces" backups - makes it very easy to retrieve stuff when a mailbox gets accidentally deleted, for example.

It may not be that useful if you make sure that deleted item retention is set in the Exchange server to (say) 30 days and you configure "dumpsteralwayson" on the clients. If that's done then it's trivial for a user to recover anything that they (or someone else!) has deleted for up to 30 days after the event.

In the event of disaster which destroys the exchange server, the full store backup is generally quicker to restore than the individual PST files but having these files does mean that users can get to critical emails very quickly if the Exchange server does die.