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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Recovering mailboxes or individual messages to a PST file may be useful—but you shouldn’t be stuck with that as your only option. Honestly, giving a user a PST file and telling them to drag and drop messages in Outlook is insanely primitive. A Backup 2.0 solution should eliminate that overhead and let you restore directly to a live Exchange Server computer.
An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Disaster recovery is what Backup 2.0 is all about, and Exchange Server is no exception.
With a disk block‐based backup image, you can quickly restore your entire Exchange Server to not just the most recent backup but also to any given point in time. You can even restore your Exchange Server to a virtual machine, which is great for huge disaster recovery scenarios where you might be hosting those virtual machines at a recovery facility or even in some online hosting provider.
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Let’s revisit our Backup 2.0 “mission statement” from Chapter 1:
This is a tricky statement to evaluate when it comes to Exchange. Certainly, with CCR or LCR, we can achieve backups that offer very little downtime; in the case of CCR, downtime might amount to a few seconds. We would certainly lose very little data, although some data loss is possible because both CCR and LCR utilize asynchronous replication, meaning it’s possible for a few minutes’ worth of transactions to occur on the source, yet not replicate to the mirror when a failure occurs.
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
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If looking on Exchange Server 2007, Exchange includes a feature called Clustered Continuous Replication. CCR is designed to replicate Exchange DB transactions – the individual changes that are made to the database – to a separate Exchange Server computer. There are specific hardware, software, & environmental requirements to make CCR work, and it does require that you have additional Exchange Server computers in the environment. CCR is Microsoft’s preferred solution for whole-server recovery because it essentially keeps a spare copy of the Exchange database on a separate machine. The costs involved in CCR can be quite high, however, because you’re basically maintaining a complete, spare Exchange Server machine – hardware & all, unless your spare is virtualized – just sitting around waiting for the 1st server to fail.
A variation of CCR is Local Continuous Replication; LCR differs in that it uses transaction replication to create a copy of the Exchange database on the local server, on a separate set of disks. This gives you a copy of the database without the need for a separate server, although your Exchange Server hardware obviously remains a single point of failure in that scenario. LCR is less expensive than CCR but does require extra locally-attached storage on the Exchange Server computer.
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
he most common restore scenarios in Exchange are single-message recovery or single-mailbox (including all of its messages) recovery. An article at msexchange.org details a fairly common way of doing this in Exchange Server 2003: Start by installing the free ExMerge utility (available here). Restore your database backup from tape or whatever—you may wind up restoring it to a different Exchange Server so that you’re not affecting your production server. You’ll be able to use ExMerge to export the desired mailbox to a PST file, which can be opened with Microsoft Outlook. If you want to recover a single message, you attach that PST to an Outlook client and go hunting for the message you want. Messages can be “dragged” out of the PST file, via Outlook, and “dropped” into an active Exchange mailbox to get the message back onto the server.
An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Exchange Server backups can be complicated from a process viewpoint. Consider the figure below. It proposes that Exchange Server not be backed up. Instead, it suggests enabling circular logging—meaning Exchange’s transaction log will automatically overwrite older entries as needed to write new ones. Using CCR, the Exchange database is replicated—on this figure—to two passive nodes, making two complete copies of the database. One passive node sits in the data center, ready to take over in the event of a failure in the production Exchange computer. The other passive node is in an offsite location and delays replaying incoming transactions by 7 days—meaning its copy of the database is always 7 days old.
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
So the Exchange database files are actually the result of millions of transactions being applied in-memory and then saved to disk. The database is obviously indexed so that individual messages can be found easily, and a great deal of structured data—such as which messages belong to which users—is stored in the database along with actual message data. Normally, while Exchange Server is running, only its processes have access to the database. All of this conspires to make certain backup and recovery tasks a bit more complicated:
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Microsoft Exchange offers unique problems and challenges in the backup arena. Many of these will be discussed in more detail later, but for right now, let’s briefly introduce them from a business, rather than a technology, perspective.
A Bit About How Exchange Server Works
Most of these derive from Exchange’s architecture, so it’s worth talking a bit about how that architecture works. Exchange is built around a transactional database. In this regard, Exchange is similar to SQL Server, although the underlying structure of Exchange databases is very different from the relational ones found in SQL Server. Transactional means some important things:
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An Excerpt from Don Jones’ Definitive Guide to Backup 2.0 about Exchange Server Backups.
Exchange Server’s native backup and restore capabilities are tied in part to the underlying Windows operating system’s (OS’s) capabilities—which isn’t always a good thing. Part of Exchange’s recovery capabilities come from the fact that deleted messages aren’t actually deleted from the system.
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Email clients such as Microsoft Outlook automatically move deleted messages into a Recycle Bin, where they stay for a configurable period of time or until the user manually empties the Recycle Bin. When using other email clients, such as a generic IMAP client, deleted messages are retained on the Exchange Server computer even if they’re not actually moved to the Recycle Bin; deleted messages are simply left in their original folder and hidden from the user’s view until a configurable amount of time has passed, or until the user specifically purges deleted messages as part of a “cleanup” operation. Outlook actually displays these deleted-in-place messages in a special font rather than hiding them completely, illustrating how IMAP messages are left in-place when deleted.
All of this functionality is designed to provide users with a self-service recovery option: If they accidentally delete a message, they can either undelete it or retrieve it from the Recycle Bin.
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