NTBackup and Exchange

Man I love the Exchange Blog. Congrats to the team for a great way to communicate real issues to us out in the field. Check out today's blog on backup and Exchange.

I've had quite a few clients recently that always want to buy Backup Exec or Brightstor or some other weird 3rd party backup app because that's been the routine for soooo long. Buy a server, buy a tape drive, buy the tape software, proceed. Well with Windows Server 2003 and SBS 2003 that pretty much changed, although a lot of people aren't familiar with that yet. NTBackup included in SBS 2003 is rock solid and what I use in house. Why, well as you see in the article, if Microsoft uses it for their Exchange Servers why can't I?

I'm sorry but when SBS standard costs $599 and then you come along with Backup Exec for $499 or whatever it is, that just does not make sense. Why would I torture my SMB clients to that? For individual mailbox restore? Well you still can do it with documented Microsoft KB's. Check this KB out on restoring mailboxes. The Recovery Storage feature in Exchange 2003 is cool.

I usually just up the deleted item retention time frame to something like 60 days which is just fine for all the SMB clients I have. Remember this is where SBS 2003 is cool again. Just running through the backup wizard asks you for this information. By default I believe it's 30 days, just go to something a little higher.

My advice, use NTBackup and forget it.