NTBackup not copying Exchange mailboxes

Microsoft does not support individual mail box backups - this is supposedly something that they are going to add to Exchange 2007. NTBackup will only backup/restore the entire Exchange database as a whole (and hence why you cannot see the mail boxes in ntbackup). You can restore a backup to the recovery storage group if you need but this is quite a bit of stuffing around. If you need individual mailbox backups then you need to use real backup software such as Arcserve or Backup Exec with the Exchange agent.
Exchange does have some recovery built in such as deleted mail box retension and deleted items retension.

The reason you are seeing nothing is because the backing up of individual mailboxes isnt supported in NTBackup. You could look into third party products instead to achieve mailbox backups (Symantec Backup Exec for example) but remember that mailbox backups use the MAPI interface to access the mail store so it can be problematic where performance is concerned. The other point here is that messages in the store are stored once even if the mail was addressed to 10 people, therefore backing up every mailbox in the store can take more space on disk or tape than the size of the store itself.

To get around users accidently deleting messages you could take a look at retention time, then a user or yourself can restore the deleted email from within Outlook itself.
In Outlook select the trash can and goto the tools menu, you should see "Recover Deleted Items" or something like that.
The retention period can be configured in Exchange System Manager.
- On your Exchange server open Exchange System Manager and goto your server object.
- Right click the server object and select properties. Goto the limits tab and check the "Keep Deleted Items" setting.

Setting up ExMerge to export mailboxes is another solution, depends on size of mailboxes and number of them you need to backup though.

Yet another option and one I use internally, in addition to backing up the store and using retention periods you could look at image based backup/restore products. They are commonly referred to as bare metal backup restore solutions. I use a product called ServerProtect from StorageCraft, there are others like Symantec and Acronis. The benefit when it comes to backing up using ServerProtect is that Exchange is a VSS (volume shadow services) aware application so when StorageCraft is doing its sector by sector backup of everything (files in use etc) it will quiet the Exchange store, write to the image, truncate the logs and keep going. In the event of failure you can take the images (full and incrementals) and restore the entire server to different hardware or a virtual machine.

Backing up of individual mailboxes is NOT in Exchange 2007 and is not something that is planned to be.

Individual mailbox backup is slow, inefficient and close to useless for most scenarios.

Simon.