One of the least exciting yet most important parts of an Exchange administrator’s job is making sure that the Exchange Server environment is properly backed up.  Throughout my career I’ve spent many long nights with customers who have suffered a failure of an Exchange server and discovered that their backups are unreliable or even non-existent.  In this series I will discuss Exchange Server 2007 backup and recovery and demonstrate some actual disaster recovery scenarios that I have encountered on the job.

What to Back Up on Exchange Server 2007

To understand what to back up in an Exchange Server 2007 environment you must first consider the server roles that you have deployed.  In the most basic Exchange Server 2007 deployment the Client Access, Hub Transport, and Mailbox server roles are installed.  In more complex environments more than one of each of those roles might be deployed, the Mailbox server might also be clustered for high availability, and other roles such as Edge Transport and Unified Messaging might also be in use.

In addition to the Exchange server roles there are also considerations such as the Active Directory (a pre-requisite of any Exchange environment), client data such as PST files or POP3 mailboxes, and any server-based anti-spam system that is deployed.

All Exchange Servers

Generally speaking all Exchange servers in an organisation should have their local file systems and System State data backed up.  However because Exchange Server 2007 stores much of its configuration in Active Directory you can recover some server roles without needing to have backed up any data at all.

Continue reading Exchange Server 2007 Backup and Recovery Part 1 – What Needs to be Backed Up?