AppAssure

Exchange Backup

Microsoft Exchange is a popular Microsoft messaging system and collaborative software product widely used by businesses using Microsoft infrastructure solutions.

Exchange’s major features include a mail server, e-mail client, and multiple groupware applications. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of products and often used in conjunction with Microsoft Outlook. The server supports web-based as well as mobile access to information. Because of the mission critical nature of the data in Exchange servers a comprehensive backup and recovery system is essential.

Exchange uses the Microsoft Jet database engine to store its items. This engine can handle multiple databases, now grouped into storage groups. Database files cannot be backed up while they are mounted, which is when they are online and serving requests. Instead, Exchange provides an application programming interface for backup utilities to “freeze” a database and write all new information to a temporary file. This type of backup is called online backup. Due to the nature of the Exchange database, you can only backup the entire database using this process, not a single mailbox or a few selected items. This is also true for restore operations.

On the other hand, the Exchange server also writes all of the transactions to log files. This means that a properly configured Exchange server can easily recover from a database crash by replaying the log files on a previously backed up database. Of course, if your hard drive crashes, you also lose the log files so this should be taken into account when choosing the hardware for the server’s storage.