Why Exchange 2000 Posed Backup Difficulties

On many Exchange administrators’ wish lists for the successor to Exchange 2000 is a new backup and restore architecture. The Exchange 2000 architecture is inadequate for two main reasons:

Slow restore times. Because Exchange servers must be offline during the restore process, restoring data from a backup can affect the availability of e-mail. As Exchange message databases grow past a certain size, it becomes impossible to guarantee users a reasonable recovery time should a live database become damaged.

Some storage vendors (such as Veritas Software) use proprietary disk-volume snapshot schemes to frequently capture and set aside copies of the live Exchange storage groups, which can be used to perform tapeless restores of corrupted Exchange data. However, because Exchange 2000 was not designed to work directly with a snapshot system, Microsoft does not support Exchange recovery in this manner, and even Veritas recommends that administrators also be prepared to restore Exchange from tape in the event that the snapshot copy is unusable.