Back-Up Exchange 5.5 on NT4

[Guest_imported]

Ok, We've just implemented an Exchange environment and using backup exec for our backups. It has been running for several months.

I just went in to the backup exec software and noticed that the "Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes" portion is NOT check to be backed up.

Someone told me all you need to do is backup the information store and the directory service.

Can an expert tell me what should and shouldn't be backed up?

Thanks for your help

Dark Spider

 

[dellboy]

I'm no expert but its fairly simple.....

Back up the mailboxes if you want/need to be able to restore individual mailboxes/messages quickly and easily. The mailbox is brick level and you can therefore restore a sinlge mailbox or even a message.

Backup the Private Info Store if you only require a disaster recovery solution whereby you are going to restore the entire exchange server. The Priv Info Store is a database that contains all the mailboxes etc but you can not restore an individual mailbox from it, you have to restore the the entire Exchage server and then restore the specified mailbox or message etc.

If you have the time and capacity its not a bad idea to run a backup of the mailboxes atleast once a week. I personally do this every night but that by choice, I only have 100 users and so it will run through in around 7 hours - theres a lot of data - if you have thousands of users its not practical

The Dir Info Store is much the same as the Priv Info Store but its all the Public folders

That about it really, hopefully someone else will comment, as I said I'm no expert but that how it works, or atleast how I understand/have had it explained to me

Cheers

 

[IHUDDLES]

I have always backed up probably "more than I needed to" regarding the Exchange 5.5 Server -- the BE 8.6 software and the tape drive is on a different NT 4.0 sp6 Server than the Exchange 5.5 (sp4) Server.

I back up

the two hard drives of the exchange server
(C and D)

the Information Store

the Directory store

as well as

ALL the mailboxes on a brick-level backup

I used to not get failures on anything -- now Directory Store and Information store fail every night;

yet the backups of the hard drives themselves

as well as the brick-level backups go OK

Someone said somewhere DON'T DO BOTH (the databases as part of the hard drives AND as an Information Store / Directory Store)

but I'm confused...

 

[Zelandakh]

You CAN backup both. In the event of a single deletion, you restore from the mailbox. If it is disaster recovery you do the information store.

If you restore both to a new server, you run into fairly large problems (well, I did anyway).

Other than that I concur with the above. Backup brick level every day if you have the room!