Best Way to Backup Exchange 2003?

[David_Jennings]

We currently have a 2 Exchange servers in a cluster w/ only 1 Storage Group. Both machines are running W2K3 w/o SP1 and Veritas is installed on both and connected to either via the SAN. I finally got everything configured and I'm able to backup and restore emails, but I just wanted to confirm if my selections are appropriate. There are roughly 500 users w/ email accounts.

I have 2 jobs scheduled daily: the 1st job backs up the information store and the transaction logs(60 gbs) and takes about an hour. The second job backs up the system state of each of the 2 servers as well as the public mailboxes and individual mailboxes. The 2nd job fails due to issue's with accounts in AD, however I've been able to restore email successfully.

My question is 2 fold: 1.) Am I backing up sufficient data to recover in the event Exchange crashes and needs to be rebuilt? and 2.) Is a daily full backup of both the information store and individual/public mailboxes necessary or will a differential on the later suffice?

[priya_khire]

Hello,

It seems you are backing up using the Exchange agent. The selections seem fine for a proper recovery. You can take incremental backups and regular full backups instead of taking full backups everyday.

For more information on backup exec, databases and cluster, refer to chapter 15 on page 667 in the BE admin guide. Here is the link for download:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/279401


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Regards.

[David_Jennings]

Thanks for the reply. Just a quick question, if i were to back up the information store once a week, and run a full backup that night and incremental the rest of the week would I be able to recover all the data in full in the event of a disaster? I'm just trying to minimize backup time and still be able to recover.

[tejashree_Bhate]

Hello,

In that case you would need to restore the last full and all the incrementals.

Thanks.