Microsoft Exchange Backup – Everything You Should Know About It

What can be worse for a business than to lose time and money? Today businesses depend more on the servers and network deployed applications rather than anything else. For example, if you rely on MS Exchange Server in your everyday business operations, you can easily translate server downtime into lost revenues. And if you happen to lose data stored on the MS Exchanger Server (MES), the consequences for your company may be even more tragic.

This raises an important issue: how to efficiently protect data stored on MES without having to stop operations? The answer to this question is a good MES backup program. The use of the backup program gives you a number of important advantages. Firstly, the program allows doing automatic MES backup and restore. This means that once you have assigned a backup task of the MES databases, you may rest assured that in case of server failure or data loss, you will be up and running in no time.

So how do you choose a good MES backup program? Well, to start with, you need to make sure that the MES backup feature is included in its functionality. Be careful there, because some backup software only offer this functionality as an additional upgrade, so make sure you do not buy a program to find out that the key feature is missing. To avoid the trouble, use a free trial option. This will allow you to test the MES backup feature in real action i.e. to do MES backup and restore.

Also, make sure that the MES backup program supports your version of MES. It would be a huge mistake to purchase a MES backup program which supports only MES 2003, while you need to back up MES 2007. This information should be clearly stated on the developer�¢ï¿½ï¿½s website.

Another feature you would be interested in is MES data selection. The MES backup program should be flexible enough to allow the user select specific sever data components such as email, calendar, contact and tasks as well as user data. Normally, it works like this. You click a button �¢ï¿½ï¿½MES backup�¢ï¿½ï¿½ and the data are automatically added to the backup set. Then you manually select which components to back up, or use the file filters.

To ensure convenient MES backup, you need to automate the task, so the MES backup program must be able to perform a backup task without much effort required from the user. This is normally implemented with the help of a backup scheduler. Talking about a scheduler, you need to make sure that the scheduler allows for maximum flexibility. So do some research on the scheduler options: how often can you repeat backup, can you link your backup to an event such as an execution of a third party program, for example. Can you shut down an application after the backup has been done?

Also make sure that the MES backup program allows backing up MS Exchange Server while it is running. It would not be very convenient, if you had to stop the application every time you needed to back it up. So make sure that your MES backup program allows backing up the MES databases in real time while the application is running.

The process of MES restore is extremely important too. Learn beforehand how you can restore MES. Does your Exchange backup program allow doing it automatically by just launching the MES restore task? What are other restore options? Most likely you will have to dismount the databases before doing MES restore. Are there any other useful options concerning MES restore?

Only when you have a positive answer to most of the Exchange backup questions stated above, can you safely click the Buy button on the developer�¢ï¿½ï¿½s website.

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.