Backing up an Exchange server

Usage of our Exchange server has grown over the past several years. The time needed to back up the Exchange server has continued to grow but the time we have to back it up hasn’t. What are our options for backing up the server in the shortest amount of time? – Via the Internet

Usage of our Exchange server has grown over the past several years. The time needed to back up the Exchange server has continued to grow but the time we have to back it up hasn’t. What are our options for backing up the server in the shortest amount of time?

– Via the Internet

One way of “shrinking” the back-up window is to get a tape drive that can back up the server at a faster rate than the drive you currently have. Back-up time on an Exchange server can only drop so much, so getting a faster tape drive may not help enough to justify the potential cost. Other possible options require configuration changes to your Exchange server.

The first is to spread the mailboxes you have on the server across multiple information stores. This helps you from losing the whole information store in the event of corruption by spreading the storage across several different stores. By doing this, you can back up each store on a different day and help reduce the amount of time spent on this task. The danger with doing this is if you only back up information store No. 1 in Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and it gets corrupted on Tuesday, you will lose whatever mail came in after the back-up occurred. For some, this may be an acceptable option but one you need to think about.

Backing up the mailboxes, or doing what is called a “bricks”-level backup, is the one task on an Exchange server that can take the most time because it seems to run the slowest. There are several ways you handle the mailbox backups. One option is to do a full backup on the weekends when you theoretically have more of a back-up window and then back up just the e-mail that has come in each day during the week. This should take less time and still give you a way of backing up the messages. An alternative here is to identify the “critical” mailboxes that have to be backed up at any cost and back up just those mailboxes on a daily basis. What I have listed here are just some of the options you have. Check with your back-up software to see if it has any “Best Practices” documents that may have other methods to consider.