How to back up Exchange Server 2000, 2003, 2007 and 2010

Summary: BackupAssist offers three ways of backing up your Exchange Server:

  • Using VSS with the File Protection, File Archiving, Rsync and System Protection you can create consistent VSS application backups of Exchange Server 2003, 2007, and 2010. Simply choose your Exchange Server from the list of detected applications (you can even drill down and choose individual storage groups, etc).
  • Using NTBackup, you can perform live streaming backups of a running Exchange Server 2000, 2003 and 2007.
  • Using System Protection on Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 you can perform live streaming backups of Exchange Server 2007 and 2010. You can read more about this here.

Using VSS to backup Exchange 2003, 2007 or 2010

Perform your Exchange Information Store backup using File Protection, File Archiving, System Protection or Rsync.

  1. Create a new BackupAssist job using File Protection, File Archiving, System Protection or Rsync.
  2. When selecting files and folders to backup, simply choose your Exchange Server from the list of detected applications running locally on the machine.
    • If your Exchange Server is not listed, make sure that the VSS writer for Exchange is enabled. See here for more details.
  3. When the backup runs, BackupAssist will notify the Exchange Server VSS writer that a backup of the information store is about to occur. BackupAssist will also perform the consistency checks and log file truncation required to correctly back up Exchange Server. This is shown in the Backup Report.
  4. To restore your Exchange Server from a VSS application backup use the BackupAssist Restore Console.

Using NTBackup to back up Exchange running on Server 2003 or SBS 2003:

Perform your Exchange Information Store backup using NTBackup.

  1. Create a new BackupAssist job using NTBackup
  2. When editing the job, under the Exchange tab, select the Exchange servers you wish to back up.
  3. When the job runs, BackupAssist tells NTBackup to back up Exchange using the legacy streaming method.
  4. Use NTBackup to restore your Exchange Server.