Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 Inside Out

The Windows Server Backup plug-in for Exchange

Over many years of Exchange, you were able to use the standard NTBACKUP utility to back up databases to disk or tape. The backups were based on an Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) application programming interface (API) that backed up or restored data as a stream to tape or disk, rather than the VSS snapshot-based backups that are used today. Although tape backups were certainly effective, the growing size of databases meant that it took longer and longer to perform backups, even with faster tapes and sophisticated tape libraries. When they first supported Exchange 2007 SP1 on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft decided to remove the ability to make streaming backups for Exchange databases when they decided ...