We are currently a month away from going live with Exchange 2003. What backup solutions have you found to be the best? Easy to use is important as admin's will be doing restores most of the time. Currenty our company wants to be able to go back 3 days to restore.
Also what anti-virus software do you recommend for the Exchange server?
Many of the Windows based Exchange backup software on the market does the job, especially for smaller environments. CommVault Galaxy, Veritas Backup Exec, etc are fine. What is more important is to have your delete item retention set correctly, this way you won't have to go to tape. If disk permits 21 days for delete item detention in them mailboxes and the same for mailboxes. I also recommend to not delete the items until they have been backed up. This will allow the users to recover their mail with only a little assistance from IT for up to 21 days after they deleted it. Of course you can also up that to however long you would like just remember it is going to eat up disk and tape since it doesn't actually get removed from the database until the maintenance period after the timer has been met.
As for AV again many of them are fine. My prefence is usually Microsoft Antigen (formerly Sybari Antigen) or Trend Micro ScanMail. I have heard others have really like the GFI product but that has usually been smaller shops. I personally have only seen it a couple times.
- Joel
In checking MSFT site they had roadmaps dealing with the fact that they used ntbackup for backup and restore of Exchange databases. What are the known + - of this?
Also the client only wants to go back 3 days for backup in case of an emergency restore. They want no historical data, just a 3 day floating window. Is this possible with ntbackup or should I look to 3rd party programs?
NTBackup works fine but is limited in its features and in large environments has a tendancy to become hard to manage since there is no centralized console. Thats not to say it can't be done but many opt for other products.
It also only supports a small subset of tape drives/libraries and its job scheduling engine is task scheduler. It is really best suited to backup to disk or to a single direct attached tape drive. It should work well in a smaller shop, just make sure to check to make sure to monitor that the backups are running properly.
We will not be using tape backup. We will be storing the backups on a Netapp filer. So other than issues with tape drives, can I be confident it will do the job I am needing it for?