One of our most appreciated and valued product features is our possibility to perform full Exchange backup and recovery. Many of our customers are small and midsize businesses and for many of these companies the Microsoft Exchange Server represents the most mission-critical business application.

(Un)fortunately Microsoft implemented a rather complicated architecture for backup and recovery. This offers BackupAgent both a challenge and opportunity to deliver online backup services for MS Exchange. The opportunity for BackupAgent is not only to backup the complete Exchange server, but also to protect novice users from the likely possibility of data loss due to a configuration error in the backup strategy. Unlike most other popular online backup products, BackupAgent detects broken log sequences, which it requires to perform fast and complete incremental backups without having the risk of data loss. Somehow our friends at Microsoft assume that the responsibility of backing up Exchange is always in the hands of well-trained technical experts. For our customers this often not the case.


Another challenge is the average size of the Exchange mail stores. Many mail stores become rather large, running into 50 GB in size or even larger. It is hard to perform an online backup of these stores, since limited bandwidth can cause backup windows of several days to perform backups. Also, for fast and full recovery of a Microsoft Exchange Server it is simply not enough to restore the files that represent all the mail stores. BackupAgent offers the possibility to deliver the critical data on a portable hard disk to avoid a long upload or download period for first backup and recovery. Alternatively, BackupAgent can automatically restore critical mail stores in an Exchange recovery environment in the data center.

One of the most interesting new trends regarding fast restore is to combine online backup with Hosted Exchange. BackupAgent becomes an easy migration tool to migrate Exchange mail stores from the on-premise server(s) to the hosted environment in the data center. A hosting company can use a (possible) crash of Exchange to convert the customer to Hosted Exchange subscriptions. Obviously, all important data of the customer is already available in the secure data centers and a restore will be very fast, since there will be no bandwidth issues.