Questions about brick level backups

[MyEyesAreBurning]

I understand that brick level backups backup exhange mailboxes into .pst files so they can be moved to different servers or used for recovery so... I guess that my question is whats he difference between backing up using exmerge or just backing up the database and transaction logs? I know that I have some reading to do but if anyone has any input that would be great.
Thanks,
MEAB

 

[MiniOrganMorgan]

As far as I know, brick level backups run back each item in the database individually, by item I mean an email, task, calendar entry, which gives you the ability to restore an item directly back into an mailbox. I don't think the brick level exports out to PST first.

Unfortunately as it backups on a per item level these kind of the backups stress the database more heavily which leads to a great chance of failure and will take longer to complete as it has to parse the entire file. Running Exmerge to export the mailboxes to PST would effectively do the same thing; ie an item by item parse of the whole database.

Backing up Exchange on a database level via an Exchange aware backup program (either BackupExec/Arcserve/your favourite + agent or NTBackup), coupled with deleted item/mailbox retention configured is the best way.

 

[icsboi]

MiniOrganMorgan>

We use arcserve and I agree. We don't use brick level, also becuase there are third part utility that can extract individual mailboxes from the EDB file.