Backing Up Exchange Mailboxes. Is NTBACKUP really that bad?

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K@izer§øze™

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I finally set my exchange server up and installed state of the art antispam and anti virus software on it. Now i'm getting down to setting up the backups. I see people trying to sell mailbox backup software for tens of thousands of rands, but exchange 2003 has NTbackup built in. Is it reliable? We are 40 users and i am limiting the mailbox size to , well, i still need to decide, as its a bit of a contentious issue. Any tips would be appreciated. I did ask this long ago, but cant find the thread...:o
 
K@izer§øze™ said:
I finally set my exchange server up and installed state of the art antispam and anti virus software on it. Now i'm getting down to setting up the backups. I see people trying to sell mailbox backup software for tens of thousands of rands, but exchange 2003 has NTbackup built in. Is it reliable? We are 40 users and i am limiting the mailbox size to , well, i still need to decide, as its a bit of a contentious issue. Any tips would be appreciated. I did ask this long ago, but cant find the thread...:o
Click to expand...

Does it do brick level backup? In other words, can you restore an individual email? I can't remember it does.
 
NTBACKUP will back up the ENTIRE Exchange database. So if you need to restore a specific mailbox ... you can't - you can only restore the entire database thereby everting all the other mailboxes to when the backup was taken.

"Pay for" backup solutions will allow you to backup the entire database, but as individual items. This makes it possible to restore a specific mailbox, folder or item within a mailbox without affecting the other mailboxes.
 
No, Exmerge does the brick level backup. But i was advised against that too?..Im thinking its a conspiracy...lol.
 
Its a seriously bassackwards approach...

The expensive stuff will do live backups of the Exchange system without having to unmount the info store or anything of that nature...
 
Symantec Backup Exec is quite good. We install it on all our clients servers. You can even restore individual emails
 
40 users, save yourself some money and do archiving via Outlook, set the archives to place the .pst to network drive, daily if you like, do full database backups via Nt.

point is not all backup solutions pertain to all enviroments, find the solution that fits your enviroment and your pocket, there are loads, you can even use ontrack software, take that .edb database and restore mail from individual boxes, again there are loads of options.
 
Having used Exmerge a few weeks ago, I can say that to use it as a backup tool would be madness. I had to use it to extract mailboxes from a dying Windows Server, and the process took 2 and 3/4 hours, due to all the mailboxes and the sizes of them. This was on a dual Xeon 2.4Ghz system with 2GB Ram. From an 8Gb edb file, it extracted a total of almost 14Gb.

NTBACKUP will do the job of backing up your whole store, but it's not the best or most flexible tool out there. Unfortunately, that's part of the problem with Exchange backups, the best software will cost quite a bit.

I just use Acronis at work to backup the whole server, and it covers Exchange ok enough. This is with almost 350 users.

If you find something good, let us know please. I'm always interested to learn.
 
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