James Chan

When you implement Exchange Server in your productivity environment, you will find that backing up the data is a headache. As a part time IT manager in FBV, I have been trying to find out a better way, in my spare time, to backup the important data, specially the email messages which is the biggest and most difficult part.

I googled it up and there showed many options in terms of backing up the data. You can either use the NT backup built-in Windows Server 2003, or third party software. I tried NT backup however the result was not what I expected actually because it backs up the whole Storage Group. We have about 5 mailboxes set up in one Storage Group, over two years of emails message accumulated, the size is over 16G now. And when it does backup, the size of the backup is too big to write into a DVD. On the other hand, too many messages in the mailbox will drag the Microsoft Outlook into water and make it very slow which I don’t want to see. So my idea is to archive the messages of each mailbox by year and back it up, then delete the old messages for free more space and speed up Outlook.

Among all the solutions I have found, the brick-level backup with ExMerge is quite a good choice. To implement ExMerge is not too hard and it integrates with Exchange Server very well. Next up I am gonna walk you through the solution.

(to be continued…)