In my twelve years of experience as a system administrator I faced the challenge of restoring MS Exchange Servers several times during my professional career. Although the Online Backup Client in combination with the recovery tool from BackupAgent makes it relatively easy, the restore of an Exchange environment is, and will always be a difficult task.

The store level backup is the most common backup, and even the preferred backup method of Microsoft. This is the only correct way to do a full disaster recovery of an Exchange Server. The examples and experiences I write about, are mainly about store level backup and restore.

An alternative is folder level backup (also known as ‘brick-level backup’) where you can backup the mailboxes of a user on folder level. The third way is a combination of the two, where you perform a store level backup and run a folder level backup of the important mailboxes or calendars.

To share my knowledge about Exchange backup and restore, I created a best practice for the backup and restore of an Exchange environment using our BackupAgent software which can be downloaded here. This whitepaper can be very helpful in case you want to work out a backup strategy with BackupAgent, or if you need to do a full disaster recovery.