Earlier I wrote about Backup and Recovery considerations for email administrators in an enterprise environment and the need for establishing a well defined Recovery Time Objective (RTO). And I related that it has been estimated that 40 percent of recoveries fail. If you’re using tape for your backups and recoveries then you have probably already noticed that it can sometimes take hours to fully restore your email backups to your required point in time established by your specified RTO.

An alternative to using traditional tape backups for your email servers is to instead write your backups to disk. Data recovery is usually much faster when using disk technology as opposed to tape. But you still need a well written backup and recovery procedure.

Even if your backup and recovery procedure is well planned and thought out you can still have problems during implementation. Procedures that have too many dependencies or complexities are more prone to errors. Most often backups must be initiated after hours so as to avoid impacting a running production environment.

And if you are running a Windows-based file system and require a consistent point in time for your file captures then most often you’ll need to use an open file manager. File system backups can take several hours and consume many CPU cycles when the backup software has to read through the huge amounts of file system related metadata, select the files for backup, and then perform the backups. Most daily backups are incremental with full system backups occurring on the weekends. The time and impact on utilization of resources require this type of scheduling.

In almost all enterprises it is an ongoing requirement of the IT department to reduce the backup window. One technology that can help alleviate the negative impact of backups for email servers as well as other servers is known as Continuous Data Protection (CDP).

With a good file-based Continuous Data Protection product installed, administrators can avoid the problems that can occur as a result of viruses, corrupted or deleted files and normal operations issues. Email data such as email messages or mailboxes can be recovered with a CDP product that is optimized for Microsoft Exchange.

Products on the market exist that can track file system changes continuously through the use of filters on specialized servers. File changes are tracked and logged which result in faster file recoveries. In the case of email servers, recovery can be as fine-grained as recovering a single email file.

CDP also eliminates the need for disruptive production system backups since CDP products make use of separate servers which can then be used for tape backups if needed or still required.