Stratesave supports backup of running Exchange Server 5.5, 2000 and 2003 databases. Backups can be full, differential or incremental. The backups are performed through the Exchange server backup programming interface, to assure accuracy of backed up data.
For network backup of Exchange Server, account from where Stratesave is run must have Administrator access on the Exchange Server, and ESEBCLI2.DLL must be copied to backup server from Exchange Server. See Network Database Backup for details.
Stratesave backs up Exchange server at the database level. Within macros, you can select local or remote Exchange Server server for backup. Exchange Server 2000 is shown under ESE98-tree. ESE98 is a backup protocol used by Exchange Server 2000/2003. If installed, other ESE98-compatible databases can also be selected under that tree. The SharePoint Portal Server should not be backed up under ESE98 tree, but under the Computer directly. It must be deselected from ESE98-tree.
During a full backup, entire database is backed up. In a differential backup, changes (database logs) are backed up, since last full backup. Optionally, differential backups can be configured to fully backup the Exchange server. During incremental backup, only the update since last incremental backup will be backed up, keeping the backups small. Incremental backups are therefore for short-interval backups. During restore, Stratesave automatically restores the full backup, differential and all incremental backups in correct order, to recover the database to most recent state. Exchange server does not allow both incremental and differential backups in backup plan. Only incremental or differential backups can be done, not both.
Alternatively, Exchange Server 2003 on Windows 2003 can be backed via VSS, but only full backup. It is probably best to use either standard ESE98 interface or VSS for backup, not both.
You can restore the databases back to Exchange server. Alternatively, you can restore the backed up database(s) to file(s), for manual processing if desired. Exchange Server 2003 allows extracting single mailboxes from Exchange databases which have been restored to disk. The restored database files can be linked to Exchange recovery storage group, from where the mailboxes can be restored with ExMerge. See Exchange Server documentation for details.
See also: SQL server backup and restore