RE: Mailbox Backup

> Is
> is possible to just backup the mailboxes only and if I need to restore a
> single mailbox be able to do so?

Individual mailbox backups (aka brick level backups) are not supported in
the native NT Backup. There are third party backup programs that offer this
feature. That being said, I have found Exchange admins with much more
experience than I always recommend against brick level backups. Here is a
response to a question similar to yours on an Exchange list. It is one of the
few mailing list emails I have saved, I hope you find this helpful.

Why not to do Brick Level Backups:

1) They take a loooong time. At my last position, the priv.edb on several
Exchange servers was huge with several mailboxes exceeding 2GB. Backup
windows of 'July' is not acceptible nor necessary.

2) Brick Level break SIS in the process. At a previous employer we had an
SIS ratio of 4 (lots of little daily cash spreadsheets and the like getting
sent to DL's). This means that a BLB backup uses as much as 4 times the total
tape. Now I need an autoloader to take care of the boxes of tapes required
each night.

3) You can't perform a full server restore to point of failure with brick
level backups. You have to actually perform additional full online backups as
well to allow for full disaster recovery. More tapes. More time. More money.

4) A restore of several mailboxes from BLB's will cause the store to grow
because of no SIS. If my SIS ratio is 2 and some disaster leaves me with only
brick-level, my restore will double the size of the priv.

5) The redundant backups for brick level lower the overall performance of
your exchange server as backups compete with users for CPU cycles and disk
reads. It is also additional and unnecessary wear and tear on tape drives.

6) Brick Level Backups do not backup items in deleted item retention.
As my users (for email anyway) have always been of the educated variety,
they know and use deleted item recovery as needed.

7) A restore of a mailbox is seldom needed. (Probably the only instance is
inadvertant deletion by an administrator in Exchange5.5) With deleted item
retention set to a reasonable 30 days or so, and with deleted mailboxes
retained in Exchange2003, brick level backups fall in the category of a waste
of time and resources.

8) Backups should not be a helpdesk support option. They are a disaster
recovery requirement. With all that tape and time, the convenience of having
someone restore my mailbox is so simple I can be more careless with my email.
I can always get my info restored. The Potential for user complacency
because we can always restore uses Valuable IT time and resources.

9) Yes, it's true. For me, I have only done this using ArcServeIT.
Because of comments here in this and other forums, CA took the Exchange
agent back to the lab and did some more fixing on it. For me it was too
little too late. Basically, BLB's are not perfect. Data is not perfectly
recreated through the restore process. Problems included header info missing,
digitally signed emails corrupt, attachments missing.

10) Many, many more reputable and experienced people have shared their
horror stories over and over in this and other forums and newsgroups.
So much so that I was relieved to learn in 1998 that it wasn't just me that
felt this way. The people that have expressed this opinion I hold in high
regard and certainly owe it to myself to try to understand why the concensus
is for or against something.

11) Microsoft provides the utility ExMerge which can be used to backup a
single mailbox to .pst if necessary. I use this as the last step before
deleting a users mailbox after (s)he have left the company. It is a
simplified, granular alternative for certain circumstances.

12) Exchange2003 allows for a disaster recovery storage group to allow
Production restores without a recovery server.

HTH,

Frank

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