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Advice wanted on backing up and restoring Exchange Server 2003
Can anyone advise on the steps/procedures required in order to successfully back up and restore exchange server 2003 data.
Our Exchange server is a windows 2000 system. Ntbackup is set to back up exchange (via the tick boxes) each night.
My main concern is a) is this actually backing up the right data and b) how would i go about restoring the data to either the same computer or a new one should disaster strike.
Ideally I want to test the back up by being able to take a manual backup then restore it to a test machine - if all of our 40 users Outlook data is there upon restoring I'll be happy.
Thanks in advance.
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I believe that if you have Windows 2003 and Shadow Copy enabled on you Exchange system, NTBackup will handle the open files.
From experience restoring Exchange can be hard work. It runs on a database (Jet if memory serves me well), and synchronising the different parts can be hard work. However, I haven't used Exchange for a while (I use MDaemon instead), so restoration may be easier with newer versions.
As a general rule Backup Solutions such as Veritas Backup Exec, that have custom Exchange plug-ins make the restoration easier. They also allow you to drill in to restore parts of the database - for example, a single user's mailbox. With a basic backup you probably only have the option to roll back the whole database to a previous backup.
The test of the pudding is in the doing. It is always good practice to test your backups. And by far the best way to test backup is to restore the data and check that it is right. That means building a second test bed server and restoring to that.
Finally - You never want to be in the position where your backup tape is the only place where your data is held. Never forget that tapes fail, backups sometime don't work. So use hard drive RAIDs and invest in good quality hardware at the server to minimise the chance of failure.
Nowadays NAS hard drives are very affordable so consider backing up to hard drive too. I backup to tape daily and run a backup to NAS at weekends.
Yes it is true that with ntbackup you cannot backup individual mail boxes but it is very effective in backing up the whole mail store database. I have used this many times to both secure and restore mail stores for customers.
The quickest way to recover from a corrupt information store (edb /stm file) is to rename the current information store files then perform a restore of the latest backup. If you use the edeutil recover tool this can take upto an hour per 4-6Gb to recover. Restoring the edb file shouldnt take very long depending obviously on the size of the mail store file.
Anyway I have found it very effective backing up the information store using ntbackup and when required you can restore the latest backup and then mount the recovered version. This also ensures that your information store is fully in tact, as a eseutil recovery or repair can delete pages depending where the corruption has occured. With restore you will have a fully uncorrupt database and will be back up and running in as much time as it takes to restore the file. You can then replay any logs which have been created since the backup was taken thus bringing the store up to date.
If you need to have the ability to restore individual mail boxes then as the guys say you will need something like symantec backup which will allow you to both backup and recover individual mail boxes.
