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Windows Server Backup for Exchange incremental
Can Windows Server backup - 2008 or 2012 - do incremental backups of an Exchange VM either from within the VM or from the host of the VM? When I say incremental I mean that if I run the backup of a 1 TB Exchange VM for the first time it will take a considerable length of time. However the second time I run the backup will it only take a short time as it will only do an increment since the first time? Also assuming I ran the backup for two weeks would I be able to restore Exchange to any time within that time-frame?
Thanks in advance.
Thanks in advance.
Windows Server products have always had built in utilities to perform backups over the network, however beginning with Server 2008, the utility would no longer allow incremental backups to a destination that was across the network. Please check this tutorial, Hope it will help you!!
ASKER
I am not sure where you got the idea I wanted to do a backup across the network but I don't. So I am backing up to local USB or even local internal disk.
ASKER
Marshal Hub post does not deal with the issue I asked about. It seems he is asking for 500 points as if his answer was the solution. It's not. I wrote that it was not an he did not respond. The question should be circulated to other experts who would answer it. If that is not possible then I would ask that it be deleted and I will ask again.
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ASKER
Thanks for the info. I actually don't want to do granular recovery of individual mailboxes. As far as incremental it seems to me that any Windows Server Backup will be incremental/differential by default - its internal disk space/version management creates a base image and then differentials from then on until it decides a new full backup is needed but it still keeps the ability to go back to earlier versions just not so far back as some of them have been eliminated to save space for the new full backup. So incremental to me is the ability to recover Exchange to a specific day not the ability to recover individual mailboxes. Given that the backup pauses the VM when it backs up, I don't see any reason why I could not recover to various days. Ditto for a SQL database - if you stop it at a point in time and make a copy - and then at a later point in time - stop it again - and it makes a differential of the difference between the past base image and the current 'frozen' image - why would this be any different than any ordinary VM such as a file server. The 'frozen' VM has no processes running on it - it's a still image.
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Thanks for all the info - I appreciate the deep dive. Here is the scenario. We do a scheduled bare metal Windows Server backup internally from a VM that is running Exchange - in other words not a HyperV level backup but using the WSB option in the VM itself - to a locally attached USB drive that has been formatted as a VHD. When we go into the restore option we can see that we can restore to various past dates. So when we choose let's say a date a week earlier are you saying we would not get a full restore of Exchange as part of that to that point in time? Again I don't care about restoring a specific mailbox and assume I don't care about overwriting the current Exchange either - I just want to know whether when I choose restore I will end up with my VM as of a week earlier with Exchange as it was a week earlier.
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Thanks. I just wanted to clarify the technical point of how it worked. How it will be used is a different issue - thanks for pointing out the shortcomings in that respect.
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ASKER
Thanks for that additional tip. It sounds like the database backup is quite flexible. Can you perhaps detail a bit more how it might work in Exchange 2010, 2013 and 2016 - or link me to some articles you feel are good that you would use as your guide.
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