Overview

In Chapters 4 and 5, detailed information on backup and restore process as well as best practices are provided. The information contained in this appendix is supplemental information as provided by Microsoft to software developers desiring to utilize the ESE98 APIs in their own products (Backup, Archival, and Storage Management software). Readers who will benefit from this information are those who desire another viewpoint of the Exchange 2000 (ESE98) backup and restore process from a programmatic point of view. The ESE backup API has gone through several evolutions during the last several years paralleling the releases of Exchange Server (from 4.0 to 2000). In Exchange 2000, with the advent of a more complex storage model (multiple storage groups and databases), the backup API has been enhanced greatly.

NOTE: This information has been provided as a courtesy of the Exchange Development team at Microsoft. This information is considered Microsoft proprietary and is subject to change as the product technology continues to be enhanced.

B.1 Multi-Instance External Backup/Restore for Exchange 2000 (ESE98)

The Exchange Storage Engine (ESE) is a general database engine. The new eseback2.dll and esebcli2.dll are phasing out the old eseback.dll and edbcli.dll, which are Exchange centric, to provide backup/restore capabilities. The new APIs are designed for generic ESE applications. In this version of ESE (ESE98), ESE supports multi-instance capability, and allows each database engine instance to run independently. One instance can perform a backup while other instances can perform restores. All the instances are running within one application...