{"id":24,"date":"2008-05-15T02:27:19","date_gmt":"2008-05-15T02:27:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/?p=24"},"modified":"2019-11-13T09:50:57","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T09:50:57","slug":"exchange-mailbox-backups-on-exchange-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backupassist.com\/blog\/exchange-mailbox-backups-on-exchange-2007","title":{"rendered":"Exchange Mailbox Backups on Exchange 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Mailbox add-on in BackupAssist does work for Exchange 2007, but it also requires a little more configuration and there are two \u201cgotchas\u201d to be wary of.<\/p>\n

I have set up a simple test environment on some VMs in our test lab, and the set up works first time, every time.<\/p>\n

The gotchas<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exchange 2007 is a 64 bit application and needs to be installed on a 64 bit computer. However, the two known ways of extracting email messages to PST format (the Outlook\/PowerShell method or ExMerge) are 32 bit applications, and they link to 32 bit DLLs. As it\u2019s not possible to call 32 bit DLLs from 64 bit code, it means that extracting mailboxes to PST cannot be done on the Exchange Server itself.<\/p>\n

FIRST GOTCHA<\/strong>: You need to do the mailbox backup on a machine other than your Exchange Server (ie. remotely), and on a 32 bit OS.<\/p>\n

Why Microsoft didn\u2019t see that coming is beyond me!<\/p>\n

SECOND GOTCHA<\/strong>: you need the Exchange 2003 Server Management tools installed on your backup computer. This is only available on the Exchange 2003 CD. [Note: we are working on a version of our Mailbox add-on that will only require the Exchange 2007 Server Management Tools, which is available as a free download off the Microsoft website. We hope to make this available shortly.]<\/p>\n

How to set it all up<\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Pick a machine on which to run your mailbox backups \u2013 this must be a 32 bit machine<\/li>\n
  2. Install the Exchange Management Tools for Exchange 2003 on this machine \u2013 follow the instructions outlined in the BackupAssist Exchange Mailbox White Paper<\/a> from page 7 onwards. Or if your machine is an Exchange 2003 Server then you don\u2019t need to install the management tools (they come with Exchange!)<\/li>\n
  3. On the same machine, install and run BackupAssist, choose to backup Exchange Mailboxes, and let BackupAssist install the ExMerge program (as outlined in the BackupAssist Exchange Mailbox White Paper<\/a>)<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Our test environment<\/strong><\/p>\n

    I followed this procedure on the following test environment:<\/p>\n