Best Practices for backing up e-mail 1

[PKinghan]

Hi everyone,

We are running Exchange 5.5 on NT4 (both with latest SP) and BE 8.6 with the latest patches etc. I want to know people's views on "best practices" for running back ups of e-mail. Would I be wrong in saying that one only needs to back up the Exchange Information Directory and the Exchange Information Store? Should I be considering anything else? Are there any gaping holes on the above policy?

Many thanks in advance.

Paul

 

[dellboy]

Depends upon how user friendly you are and also how much time you have etc. If you want to be able to restore individual mailboxes then you need to back them up individually.

Backing up the private and public information store will back them up, within the private info store, but you wont be able to restore an individual mailbox, only the entire directory ie for a disaster recovery situation. (I'll stnad corrected) I do the mailboxes every night as well as priv and pub.edb it looks good if you can restore and individual message for a manager, it may take more time but it can be worth it.

16Gb x 2 takes about 7 hours but at the moment I can live with that. Choice is yours. Any questions fire away I'm rushing at the moment, sorry.

Cheers

 

[PKinghan]

Thanks Dellboy,

I'm still unsure about your comment, "but you wont be able to restore an individual mailbox, only the entire directory". What is the difference? Restoring the Information Store worked for us. I assume there are scenarios where this would not be enough in the case of a disaster however I don't know what these scenarios are. Sorry to be a pain Dellboy but can you enlighten me?

Lovely Jubbly

Paul

 

[dellboy]

I'm having real trouble starting this sentence

What I am trying to say is backing up individual mailboxes means that you can restore a single mailbox easily in the event that the user deletes important information. Otherwise you have to restore the entire private information store (which will restore all mailboxes as you correctly stated) to then select the single mailbox to recover.

You seem to have it all covered re disaster recovery, if it all goes wrong then apparantly all you really need is the public and private info stores, plus a few log files, to rebuild Exchange.
Disaster revovery is something that I am currently working on myself, ie making sure it all works if I need it to. I'm no expert but intend making sure I can restore a server in the event of the server being stolen, completely destroyed. I've seen to many people think they can restore the data and then when it comes to the crunch can not I don't particularly want to be one of them

Cheers

 

[PKinghan]

Thanks again Dellboy,

Our restore of the info store was successful last Thursday and e-mail has been running fine - that is until today. We have noticed that people trying to log on to their mail boxes on the Exchange server either cannot do so or it takes a very long time. I'm worried that there may be too much mail/pressure on the server. I read somewhere that Exchange eats up any system memory avaiable and that it's good practice to assign an upper limit to memory used for Exchange. Have you heard of this or can you throw any light onto why our 'log ons" are taking so long now?

Thanks again Dellboy

Paul