Protecting your Microsoft Exchange server for successful backups
The recommended way to protect your Exchange server is to create a single backup job that contains all of the drives on your server. However, you can choose to run your backups at the storage group and message store levels. You should consider the following to ensure a successful backup:
| Include the drive that contains your Exchange installation | Granular Restore Option uses the recovery point of the Exchange server to perform the restore operation. Therefore, you should routinely back up your Exchange server. When you create the recovery point, you should select the drive that contains your Exchange installation directory. |
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| For example, if you installed Exchange in the C:\Program File\Exchsrvr directory, make sure that you include the entire C drive in your recovery point. | |
| Include the storage group for the message store that you want to back up | A storage group is a collection of message stores. Each storage group contains a transaction log that is used to buffer writes to the message stores. You must back up the drive that contains the storage group's log files for the message store that you want to protect. |
| For example, suppose you have a storage group named First Storage Group . If the storage group contains a transaction logon E:\Exchsrvr\mdbdata, you should include the entire E drive as part of the recovery point. If you have multiple storage groups, you should back them up at the same time. If you want to back up your storage groups on different schedules, you still need to include Exchange in your backups. | |
| Include the message stores that you want to protect | A message store is a database file that stores email. Message stores are subgroups of storage groups. When you create a recovery point for a message store, you must also include its storage group. |
| For example, if you have a message store named Message Store (myserver) that is located on F:\Exchsrvr\mdbdata\Message Store (myserver).stm, you should include the entire F drive in your recovery point. |