Exchange Restore on Test Domain 1

[skk391]

Hello,

I have exchange 2003 running on a production domain. Its been running fine and is raided. However to enable me to have a good night sleep I would like to take a backup and restore to a test domain. Can someone give me some pointers on how to do this.

The test machine is not the same model is the production exchange server.

Will it go something like this:

install server 2003 & make machine DC ( with same domain name?)
install dns
install exchange with same server packs to mirror production exchange
restore from ntbackup

????

Many information or idea's would be a great help.

Thanks

 

[58sniper]

Its been running fine and is raided.

Can you be more specific?

I would like to take a backup and restore to a test domain.

What does this prove? Why not restore it to the Recovery Storage Group, as is intended and designed?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[skk391]

Ok, didnt know about the recovery storage group,will read up about it, will then allow be to recover independent mailboxes?

 

[58sniper]

Yes. Directly to Exchange or to .pst

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[terrywilson]

While restoring to a recovery storage group is a good way to test you can restore mailboxes and messages, it doesn't quite help you if you have a failed Exchange server.

Exchange stores a lot of info in Active Directory, make sure you have multiple DCs, as long as you do it will be fairly straight forward to bring back your Exchange server from backups.

No backup DCs or System State backups and things start to get a lot harder. A client suffered such a scenario and it was a bit of work ot get it all back.

Internally we now run Shadow Protect on our Exchange server; yes I'm aware you can get it back by going from traditional backup methods, its not that easy and its not that fast; with a Shadow Protect backup I know that I can get it running again on another server within the hour if I need to.