Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

Konrad Sagala — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 22:43:26 GMT

What about PF? They're still present in Exchange organizations.

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

Jaen Snyman — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:33:15 GMT

You will be running out of log file space very soon if you are not doing any backups. You need some way to clean ou the logs, unless you are turning the circular logging on which has its own challenges in an environment.

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

douggowans — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:47:18 GMT

Yes agreed - public folders need to be considered. If you only have a single public folder store then CCR\LCR might be enough to protect this data or if you have multiple databases then public folder replication may be enough. Or dump out the contents to disk on a regular basis via a script? These are some options but more thought required I think.

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

douggowans — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 11:50:34 GMT

Yes you do need to consider what to do with the transaction logs.. Truncating them with NTBackup on a weekly basis perhaps? Important point for capacity planning...

More on ...Windows 2008 or Windows 2003?

Dougs Blog >> Exchange Server in the field — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:20:26 GMT

A blog on this same subject has just been posted to You Had Me At EHLO... and there are a few points

My DPM article on 'You Had Me At EHLO' generated a number of comments...

Dougs Blog >> Exchange Server in the field — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:54:57 GMT

I recently posted an article to the Exchange Team site here and received a number of comments. I thought

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

Carol Chisholm — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:33:01 GMT

I look after several small businesses, never use Small Business Server if I can help it because it is such a pain in acquisitions and mergers.

I need offsite backup on tape, often have to get old mailboxes and old mailstores back, indeed did an Exchange 5.5 restore last month.

When confidential data is concerned, no-one trusts their ISP or hosting company!

We need a simple backup and clear logs tool (most small sites have very small logs)

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

douggowans — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 10:50:42 GMT

There will always be companies and implementations where data needs to be backed up in the traditional sense. As E2K7 is adopted (not mentioning future versions) there are more choices about what actually constitutes a backup and how to approach data protection. For long term retention of data though the realistic choices are only really journaling and backup.

Some more thoughts on SAN v DAS. Is it actually time to consider DAS?

Dougs Blog >> Exchange Server in the field — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:14:21 GMT

Ok so here's my thoughts on the whole SAN ( Storage Area Network ) versus DAS ( Direct Attached Storage

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

Asolomio — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:01:14 GMT

It's not hard to imagine mass events (organization-wide) that could leave people wishing that they (a) had a discrete backup of their Exchange data outside the context of Exchange, and (b) kept their resume more up to date. A lot of these events are missing from your analysis.

For example, a hacker, or more likely, a disgruntled administrator with administrative access to one Exchange server is going to have the same access to all the other Exchange servers in the environment, and could wreak absolute havoc deleting data from both the production and replica servers.

Similarly, a widespread virus will also affect both production and replicas (log replay delay on an SCR target can help, but it's pretty expensive). Whether you fix that with virus software or backups, it's wise to have both options.

re: Do we actually need to backup our Exchange data anymore?

douggowans — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:24:17 GMT

Yes agreed - there will be cases where we might need to revert to a copy of our data that is kept outside of Exchange.. but if this is the only requirement for our backup then this redically changes most peoples approach of backing up every night and keeping backups for the long term.. This might only require a few days worth of backup on disk - which might mean reducing the requirement on a massive tape infrastructure?

When it comes to virus infections I would want to tackle this with virus software to begin with but again I think that many companies might deploy a backup solution that protects for the short term to disk only... Plus with a combination of say Edge and Forefront where you are using multiple virus\spam engines this risk is very small.