Well, my findings are thus:
As previously reported, performing a full backup of data, etc., and on the Exchange 2003 to ONLY backup the Information Stores and with brick-level backups of only our top 3 key personnel results in a 100% successful backup.
However, when returning to the the old normal Daily Full Backup job, and as suspected, it failed!
![Smiley Mad Smiley Mad](/i/smilies/16x16_smiley-mad.png)
In fact, and as before, there were so many errors that the XML could not load and the job was viewable only in text!!!
Seeing that my new backup job was successful, I then took the next step: I added to include in the new backup job an additional 7 personnel's individual mailboxes. Of the total 10, 4 reported the same-old "access denied" errors.
However, because of the "small" amount of errors (that would have otherwise been rather large had I chosen all the individual mailboxes), the job is viewable with XML...
I have been researching page after page on the web and I still find no solution: everything appears in order as per the "solutions" thus so far found, and yet the tests I have subsequently been performing during the day have resulted in failure after failure (I have created a separate "Test" backup job and selected to brick-level backup only 2 of the 4 failed mailboxes to perform these tests).
So I am now looking rather favourably at backing up only the Information Stores (as previously mentioned by someone else in this thread).
However, I would be most interested to know how to restore a user's individual email from the Information Store.
Any ideas anyone?
ABR