Overview

Systems do not always run as smoothly as you would like. Hardware failures, software failures, human error, hacker attacks, and sometimes even natural disasters can disrupt your electronic mail (e-mail) environment. Routine hardware maintenance, disciplined system management, and educated users can reduce risk, but the potential for failures can never be eliminated completely. Disasters will happen, and you must be prepared to respond quickly. Regular backups are a key part of disciplined system management, and they protect data from accidental loss, hardware failures, and other disasters. You should regularly back up your Exchange databases and other critical files so that you can quickly restore them if data are accidentally deleted. If you accidentally delete data, you can recover a single database from the backup media. If a server fails, you can rebuild key components or the entire server.

The Exchange 2003 Information Store can be partitioned, allowing Exchange to overcome one of the more serious limitations of Exchange 5.5. Each Exchange 5.5 server was limited to a single large private database stored as a single Windows NT file containing the mailboxes for all users. The size of the Information Store grew in direct relation with the number of messages retained by the users, resulting in databases that exceeded many gigabytes in size. The large database size increased the time required to restore the database from backup tapes, which constrained the number of users you could safely put on a single server. Exchange 2003 solves this problem by allowing you to...