what is the exchange 2003 backup best practice

NT Backup that ships with windows 2003 is very good/capable backup for exchange 2003 and it is free.

It has some limitations of course (it can't take email level backups or single mailbox for ex) but it is free.

Regarding the backup policy it really depends on you database size and backup window but something like

one full backup per week and then a differential every day with 1 month history is a good start

Best practice in what way?
You need to perform a full backup for the exchange logs to be flushed using an Exchange aware backup product.

How often you do this depends on your requirements.  Personally I take a backup EVERY day of all the exchange servers I manage.

There is little point in taking a differential backup of an Exchange database.

All you will be doing is backing up the log files which doesn't cause them to be flushed.

the backup that you do is ntbackup everyday?

I use a combination of ntbackup, backup exec and windows server backup depending on the client/version

there is an  point in taking differential backup it reduces the backup window/time

Or Windows Backuo depending in which version of Exchange.  Yes.
This means I can recover am exchange database very quickly and very easily

what is backup exec, is it symantec 12.d?

yes backupexec is symantec backup software (used t be veritas) the best IMHO but not cheap

symantec back 12.d is good to backup exchange 2003 everyday, and you do ntbackup weekly?

It may reduce the backup window but it doesn't backup the actual database and it doesn't flush the log files.  It also increases recovery time.

When I have an exchane server down it needs to be backup as quickly as possible.  For me and most of my customers this is definately more important than the backuo window.

you have no point is mixing backup softwares, stick to one.

if your requirements/enviroment are simple NTBackup should be enough for you

guess it all gets back to the backup size/speed

Mmm,so use ntbackup daily ,where you save it ?to a storage or tape or external network  harddrive ? can i have more details?and which last backup keep,last week,last month...?please advise

There is no need to buy a thirdparty product the built in one works perfectly well.  The brick level backup offered by backup exec is not a Microsoft supported backuo method.

Why spend Money if you don't need to? None of my exchange servers use 3rd party backup products.

Well, again, it all depends on your setup I have customers backing up to tapes and others to disk.
backup to disk is the current "trend"

if your size is not huge you can have a rotation on 2 or 3 locations so you can have some history something like

day1 disk 1
day2 disk 2
day3 disk 3
day 4 disk 1

etc...

All of my live backups currently use tape.

And I use a rotation (and yes I do this even in my small businesses).
I have 4 Friday sets of tapes which are rotated
every 5th Friday a set of Friday tapes is replaced and the one that is removed is archived.
I then have a Monday to Thursday set of tapes.

The exchange store is a full backup each time (the shared data is only differential)

it's down to the company as to how many archive tapes they keep but most keep at least 6 months.

This is the way I do it, and all of my customers.  This is how seriously I take backups.

I have 1 customer with a robotic library that has 16 400GB tapes in it and it takes all weekend from 6pm Friday to 4am Monday to perform a full backup but the evening backups run from 18:30 to 4am.

They are fine with this because they know they will at most lose only 24 hours of work.

actualy Sir, I have one exchange 2003 current size for the store 60 GB, so I am planning to schedule it daily at nite on an external Network harddrive?what you think

I see the backup of tapes is tough!every time I have to go to server room and freezed there then remove the tape , and insert new one.better to external Hdd it will be automated no manual work

backup to disk will be just fine

Hi

I backup exchange at the end of everyweek with a full backup using ARCServe Backup.

If you need to then restore your database it is very simple and just follow the wizard almost. You can then use the logs that exchange makes to update your restored backup the to when the exchange server crashed.

Keep the backups of exchange for at least 1month. I keep up to 10 backups of exchange so I am able to go back 10 weeks if need be.

I have just done this today with my exchange server. Took me 2h 30m to get exchange back up & running without any lost emails.

and take one full backup on tape every month , what do you think Experts?
also i have problem in my End-users they are not archiving the e-mails and they are sending pic and funny movies via exchange, what I should do with these lazy end-users

the end-user issue is a completely different question you can solve it using quotas


for your backups also try to accommodate once per month a copy you could take offline home or something

again there is no benefit mixing technologies (backup to tape/to disk) and softwares

The archivimg is a seperate issue and you will need to ask a new question for that.


The backup a once monthly archive to tape would he a very good solution if your doing disk backups.

because I saw one comment before in some article saying that dont use external hdd for backup use tapes better,is that true?

I have had the problem of user mailboxes getting up to 5gb each. I have now added limits to reduce them down to 2gb. Now when a user gets their mailbox to 2gb they can no longer send emails so they soon go deleting everything.

You will find once a user hit the limit once they will start watching their mailbox size & it will soon drop down to only a few 100mb.

again backup to disk is the new "trend" I have a lot of customers backing up to disk without any issue.

Backup to tape is "better" for archiving reasons (keep a backup stored a long time)

I personally prefer tapes, they can be replaced easily the failure rate on a hard disk is probably a lot higher than a tape.

It's mainly down to personal preference.

I haven't moved my customers to hard drive backups because I don't see the need to.

and you told your customer to remove the old tape and insert new one daily?or you have advanced technology?

My customers that use tapes have tape libraries so there is no need for manual daily tape rotation

what about you Mr demazter:?

Some have manual tapes some have robotic libraries.

They ALL change the tape daily.  They have 2 staff who's responsibility this is and they sign a sheet ever day to say they have changed it.

I take backups VERY seriously and I make sure my customers do too.

10x for ur help

when using NTbackup, do i have to unmount the exchange database store?
also is Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery a good tool to recover individual mail boxes from an NT backup?