Due to legal requirements we need to store our exchange data for 7 years. In addition to the normal nightly/weekly backups I need to create a monthly backup that we can keep for years.
Currently when I look at the exchange server, the "Exchange Store" folder on disk is 264gb. When I perform a full backup of just the Information Store in BE2012 it ends up being almost 900gb - I'm assuming this is due to the creation of the index (tens of thousands of emails, etc.)
Since this is a special backup for legal purposes, the requirement for instant indexing isn't there and in all probability if we ever need to pull up the data we would build a new server and restore onto it - so I don't really need the index.
Is there a way to back up just the data without generating the index? 264gb x 12 = 3tb per year as it is, keeping 900gb per month is prohibitive.
Mark Butler
Lynden Public Schools
