Re: Mailbox Backup

The key point is number 12, the Recovery storage group. With Exchange 2003,
this allows you to restore your entire Exchange store to this special
storage area and with Exmerge, you can extract all the email from any
mailbox. Then the cool thing with Exmerge, is you can merge it back without
making duplicates. Having an identical Exchange server for recovery purposes
is a thing of the past.

--
Rick Faria - MCSE / A+
RDF Technical Services - www.rdfts.com
Email: support at rdfts dot com


"Frank" <Frank@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:7CDDDCE0-1025-41A9-BDDF-34943E3D80A0@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> 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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