Got a good question from one of the folks who attended Exchange Connections Europe in Nice. He wrote:
I am running a nightly full backup to disk of my exchange mailbox servers. This is then backed up further, to tape. I use NTBackup on Windows 2003. Do you know off-hand whether it is necessary to set verify on for these scheduled jobs? The current verification adds an additional 70 minutes, which id be happy to remove if it is overhead. Or does keeping the verification allow me greater comfort that the bkf files are good for recovery.
My answer is simple: keep the verification. It’s true that it adds overhead, but verification is a very useful belt-and-suspenders safety mechanism that helps ensure that your backups are good. That assumes, of course, that you have some means of regularly reviewing the output from your backup jobs to ensure that no intra-job errors occurred. However, unless verification is adding so much time that it’s causing you to pass your backup window, I say leave it on.
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