PrePurchase Question(s)

[SeanD]

Greetings,

Have I read the posts and BA website correctly, in that BA assist will allow a live Exchange server's DataStore to be backed up, with just the purchase of BA? And have I read the other post correctly, in that with BA, an individual can restore an individual Exchange user mailbox, if on an Exchange 2003 Standard, running on Windows Server 2003 (whitepaper post)?

Thanks

[Andrew]

Hi SeanD,

Thanks for your post, this is Andrew from BackupAssist support.

You are correct that BackupAssist will allow you to do a live backup of an Exchange Information Store. This can be done for either a local or remote Exchange server.

As far as restoration of individual mailboxes is concerned, the answer to this is also YES! You can restore individual mailboxes from your backup file as detailed in our whitepaper here - http://www.backupassist.com/downloads/R ... change.pdf. Be aware that you won't see the individual mailboxes in NTBackup though. As the pdf mentions, you'll have to restore the whole exchange to a 'recovery group' then move the individual mailboxes across.

If you require the ability to restore individual mailboxes directly from the backup then the best way to do it is to use a utility provided by Microsoft and shipped with Exchange 2003 called Exmerge. Using this utility you could extract the mailbox that you need to backup from the Information Store and then include it in your backup as a normal file. Then, if you need to restore it, all you need to do is import the file and you are up and running again, and with minimal effort. For more information on Exmerge please go to http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/ExM ... ilbox.html or http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/techi ... ptip02.asp.

[supercsa67]

I was wondering however, how does one go about restoring individual or specific public folders? We have a large public folder section with an extensive folder structure. I wouldn't want to have to restore the whole public folder section, just specific ones.

Can this be done with BackupAssist?

Thanks,
Carlo

[Andrew]

Hi Carlo

The best suggestion I can make is to follow the steps provided in the following article from the MS Technet website -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodte ... 636a7.mspx

How you would then go about restoring individual folders I am not sure, as I have never attempted to do this by itself.

I would suggest that you should restore the Public Folders to a recovery group as mentioned in the earlier post, as this would at least protect you from doing anything damaging to the live Information Store.