System Backups

System Backups

A very wise person once said that an important difference between an electronic mail and word processing applications was that when a word processor stopped working its effect was normally confined to a single user and perhaps a small quantity of documents. But when an electronic mail system collapses everyone is affected and normally it?s the people at the top who notice fastest (and complain quickest).

Electronic mail systems depend on many different hardware and software components to keep everything going. If any element fails to operate in the required manner data corruption can occur. If the hardware suffers a catastrophic failure, or the site where the computers are located is afflicted by some disaster, you?ll need to know the steps necessary to get your users back on-line as quickly as possible. In all these instances system backups are a prerequisite.

Backups, in their purest sense, are snapshots of a system?s state at a certain point in time. All of the data available to the system should exist in the backup and should be restorable to exactly the same state if required. Backups can be written out to many different forms of magnetic or other media, although the most common type is some form of high-density magnetic tape.

The standard backup utility (NTBACKUP.EXE) provided with Windows NT V3.51 or V4.0 is not suitable for taking backups of an Exchange server due to the nature of the complex connections between the Information Stores and the transaction logs (see the...

< Previous Excerpt Next Excerpt >

Purchase This Book

Microsoft Exchange Server 5.5: Planning, Design, and Implementation

TABLE OF CONTENTS

System Backups

Contact Preferences

This is embarrasing...

Customize Your GlobalSpec Experience

Select Your Free Newsletters

Industry Newsletters

Select Your Free Product Alerts

This is embarrasing...