Concepts

Backup and Restore Strategies

The backup strategy you choose has a direct impact on the method you use to restore Exchange. If you create full backups on a daily basis, you need only one tape to restore Exchange. This backup method minimizes the volume of data and the time it takes to restore Exchange.

Before choosing a backup strategy, it is important to understand how Exchange stores information. Exchange 2000 allows you to create multiple smaller databases on a single server. However, to reduce the overhead of multiple sets of transaction log files, Exchange 2000 uses storage groups. In this case, only one set of transaction log files is required for an entire storage group.

This diagram illustrates the architecture of Information Store. Exchange supports 20 databases per server, with a maximum of 5 databases per storage group. Although each instance of a database runs under the same Information Store process, you can mount or dismount individual databases dynamically. The advantage is that you can restore an individual database from a backup while other database instances service client requests.

Best Practices that can improve performance and reliability of backup and restore:

• The version of Backup that is provided with Windows 2000 cannot be used with Exchange. Read the Release Notes before performing a backup or a restore. The Release Notes contain the most up-to-date information about installing updates and fixes for Exchange 2000.
• You can select multiple databases at once to back up. Backup will save the databases one after another. You cannot have multiple instances of Backup running and try to create backups of multiple databases within the same storage group.
• When restoring a database, specify a location in Backup to restore logs to a temporary location. To restore a database, Exchange will first apply the older transactions logs from the temporary directory, and then apply the more recent logs from the original location.

  Important   When restoring log files, you should never choose the same folder that your original transaction logs are stored in.

This section contains information on how to perform back ups and restore data.

For more back up and restore guidelines:

• Server Backups
• Understanding Disaster Recovery