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Backing Up Exchange Data … In Case of Emergency

In this article, we’re going to talk about the importance of protecting the proprietary intellectual property, business critical information and mission critical data contained within your Exchange databases, and how to use Exchange archiving to enhance those protections and guard against loss. Let’s first consider what can happen to data stored within Exchange that makes backups so critical.

No matter how highly available or fault tolerant you make your Exchange infrastructure, you can’t guard against mistakes, and users will delete things, only to come back a week or a month later and need you to restore things. You could implement legal hold, but frankly, you do want them to be able to delete the garbage from their mailbox.

Disaster can strike your datacenter in the form of fire, flood or other catastrophic event. Having backups and storing them offsite, ensures that once you have hardware in place, you can get back up and running quickly without any data loss.

Accidents happen in Exchange as well. Hard drives fail and databases corrupt, and sometimes data will be lost. Users running in cached mode have an OST to fall back on, but you still need to get that data back on Exchange, and not everyone runs in cached mode.

Backups provide that safe, extra copy of data that you can fall back upon when needed. You can make backups and keep a week, a month, a quarter, or even a year’s specific backup so you can restore things to a past point in time, which can prove to be very useful as well. You can use Microsoft’s built-in backup application, or a third party application to back up Exchange databases. When you need to restore data, it will be available for you.

Windows backup uses the VolumeShadow-copy Service, which incidentally is the only supported way to back up Exchange data. If you opt for a third party product, make sure it uses VSS!  When you perform a backup of an Exchange database, you are capturing a backup of all the mailboxes on that database at a point in time, so that you can restore them if and when necessary. All of the information in the user’s mailbox at the point in time when you made the backup will be available; email messages, contacts, tasks, calendar items, etc. However, if you use mailbox quotas, you may be missing some critical information. Anything the user has stored in a PST is beyond the reach of any Exchange backup. It’s often that the most critical information a user may need to refer to that can be lost when a PST file is corrupted or deleted.

Storing PST files on a network drive so that they can be backed up may seem like a good idea, but that is explicitly not supported by Microsoft. The performance impact upon the file server, along with the increased risk of corruption, makes this a very bad idea. Backing up PST files from dozens or even hundreds of workstations is also not a manageable approach, but you cannot provide an unlimited mailbox size to users, so what can you do?

Enter Exchange archiving. Exchange archiving provides your users with a storage place that can store email that is in addition to their normal Exchange mailbox. As long as your user is online (or using OWA) the Exchange archive is available, but it is not cached to an OST like a regular mailbox is. You or the user can configure rules to automatically move mail into the Exchange archive based on conditions, such as when mail reaches a certain age. An Exchange archive serves several purposes:

·       It helps provide users with significantly more email storage

·       It helps keep mailbox database sizes manageable

·       It reduces the amount of data stores on a workstation

·       It eliminates the need for PST files.

When you use the built-in functions of Exchange archives, you create mailbox databases to store users’ archives, just like you would a database to hold their primary mailbox. You also back it up, restore it and perform maintenance on it in the same way you do any other mailbox database. To a user, the only difference is that the archive is not available offline. To the admin, there’s really no difference at all.

Third party Exchange archiving solutions can provide additional capabilities, including features and capabilities not found in the Exchange archiving that come with the product. Look for third party solutions if you want to enhance your Exchange archiving with features, such as:

·         No need for Exchange enterprise CALs

·         Archive storage that’s separate from your Exchange infrastructure

·         SQL to store the archives

·         Single instance storage

·         Tools to import PST content into archives automatically.

However you approach your email storage, ensuring that you perform regular backups of all your users’ mailbox data is a critical part of email administration. Back up early, back up often, keep extra copies at least at months’ end, and regularly verify your backups by performing test restores to ensure that you will be able to recover any user’s data at any time.

This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. Read more on how to improve your Exchange archiving.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

 

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