MCITP: Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Messaging Design and Deployment: Study Guide

Chapter 3. Designing Recovery and Messaging Services to Meet Business Demands

The main subjects of this chapter are as follows:

• Exchange-aware backup solutions

• Backup and restore requirements for every Exchange Server 2007 role

• Business requirements that influence the supporting infrastructure

• Overview of possible dependent services that impact high availability

Designing Disaster Recovery, Backup, and Restore Solutions

If disaster strikes, you should be able to recover your data as soon as you want it to be recovered, shouldn't you? In this part of the chapter, we will see what data needs to be backed up for every Exchange 2007 server role, and how this backup can be made and restored. After going through all possible backup procedures, we will highlight the different recovery possibilities you can use.

Exchange-Aware Backup Application

Every article or book you read dealing with disaster recovery and Exchange confirms that you have to use an Exchange-aware backup application. But why? The reason is quite simple. An Exchange-aware backup tool will tell Exchange that it is going to make a backup of its database files and log files, it will check every page of the database file for corruption, and after finishing the backup, the backup tool will make sure that the database files are marked as being successfully backed up and all log files that are redundant will be purged automatically!

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