In his article, “Introduction to Exchange Server 2010 Backup and Recovery”,  Paul Cunningham discusses the importance of backup and recovery to corporate IT departments. He also mentions that most IT guys – and gals – do not go into the Information Technology field in search of becoming a Backup and Recovery expert.  This is absolutely true seeing as how there’s not a whole lot of time spent on backup and recovery in information technology classes.

Deciding on a backup and recovery plan involves a lot of discussion and questions. Everyone knows they should be backing up their data but not everyone agrees on the frequency of the backups. How often should full backups be performed? How often should incremental backups be performed? Not everyone agrees on the tools they should be using to backup up their data. Experienced administrators will have their own preferences. Non-experienced administrators can start with the basic backup and recovery tools.

Fortunately there is a plug-in that is included with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 for Windows Server Backup. Administrators can use this plug-in to backup and restore their Exchange databases. Making copies of your Exchange data is facilitated with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)-based backups.

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Occasionally your end users will open up their emails or personal folders and make the horrific discovery that their files have seemingly disappeared. They try a couple more times and then, after concluding that one of their co-workers has planted a virus or hacked into their email, they go bursting into your cubicle, panicking and pleading with you to please find their email!!!

Lucky for you, you know a thing or two about a thing or two

There are a couple of reasons why email disappears from email folders. One of those reasons is that the <dot> Personal Store (PST) folder for the default email has accidentally been deleted by a user for whatever reasons. It’s possible that the “Del” key was accidentally hit or the Shift plus Del key combination may have been mistakenly chosen. It’s also possible that the Deleted Items Folder was emptied out. And there will probably be the suspicion that someone other than the owner did remove it intentionally. So checking the logs will be an appropriate course of action once you – the administrator – have restored some office sanity.

And with viruses as common as they are today there always exists the possibility that Microsoft Outlook emails were lost due to a virus attack. Sometimes just the action of compacting a <dot> PST file can cause corruption due to the 2GB <dot> PST file size limit. If the <dot> PST file header is corrupted this can also lead unreadable emails.

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