Alternatives to Brick Level backups

[Teknoratti]

Has anyone come across a viable method of backing mailboxes other than using the brick level backups?

As with other users on this thread, using brick level backups is entirely too slow for our Full backups,and this exceeds our backup windows to the point where it is stuck on mailboxes for over 20 hours and it is still no where close to being finished. Our Incrementals seem fine.
And the more emails that are received means the larger the mailbox.

Does exchange purge mailboxes more than x amount of days. Is there a way to set up exchange to purge inbox items older than 6 mos or something to that effect.

I was thinking about running the Incrementals on the Mailboxes from Mon-Thur. On Fri, I would run a full backup, minus the mailboxes. On Sunday morning going into Monday morning, run another Incremental on the mailboxes in order to get the items that have changed since Thursday.

Give thoughts..

 

[PaulW1977]

One method of doing Brick-Level backups other than using the Exchange Agent would be to use run a procedure that uses EXMERGE to export all the mailboxes to a directory. This would need to be done before each backup.

The resulting PST files would then be backed up and would be available for restore if needed.

Note that this requires enough disk space to hold all PST files, which could greatly exceed the size of your information store due to single instance storage.

 

[davidmichel]

You might consider doing bricks level only for those users that are higher up on the food chain, such as manager, execs, etc.

Also consider doing some investigation as to the contents of user mailboxes (ck the laws in your state, but in many states the company has the right, and in some cases obligation to inspect user mailboxes). For example say user John Smith has a 20gig mailbox which just happens to contain 19.5gig of pictures. I've come across that more than once.

 

[Teknoratti]

davidmichel,

I was actually thinking about that. I just want to back up the certain content from the individual mailboxes.

But as long as I have the Information store backed up, I should be able to restore mailbox items if I needed to. It would just be a whole hell of a lot difficult.

 

[vschumpy]

Although I have not used this myself, I have seen several other people recommend 'powercontrols' in the past:

http://www.ontrack.co.uk/powercontrols/

 

[myauto]

1.use differential backup during brick level backup
2.try ARCServe new function Document level backup
3.use MS exmerge(but this is slow also)