Backing Up Exchange 2007 and 2010 with Windows Server Backup

One of the big outcry’s in the Exchange world was with the release of Exchange 2007 and Server 2008 and the omission of the ability to backup and flush your Exchange logs, this meant that a lot of Exchange admins had to go out and purchase a 3^rd party backup tool, with previous versions of Exchange and Windows server all backups could be done with the tools built into windows, but this was taken away, but now I am pleased to say that this feature is now available again.

We actually went out and purchased Backup Exec for Exchange which is great and gives you the ability to restore an individual mail from a user’s mailbox backup but is costly and if you wish to just do a quick backup to flush your logs is a costly solution.

So how do you backup and flush Exchange logs with windows backup? Read on and all will be revealed.

From the server running the mailbox role launch windows server backup from the start menu

From the backup interface choose “Backup Once”

Click next and choose “custom” you can choose a full server backup but for this example I will just select the data drive “E:\” that contains the Exchange folders.

Click on “Add Items” and select the drive you wish to backup

The important thing to note is to clear your exchange logs you must click on “Advanced Settings” and choose the VSS Settings tab

To clear the Exchange logs you must choose “VSS full backup” then click ok

Click next and choose whether to backup to a local disk or remote file share

If you choose the inherit option and have used this location before you will see another dialog box open as illustrated below

After you have clicked OK. to start the backup job running just click “Backup”

You can at this point click close and the job will continue to run to completion.

Please note the consistency check for Exchange does take a number of hours to complete on my Exchange mailbox server so please stick with it and it will complete.

Windows server backup may not be the backup solution of choice but if you run a small organization mail environment and just need a quick backup to flush your logs perfect and i am very pleased that Microsoft have listened to Exchange admins and put this feature back into Windows Server.

Now how about a Windows Server SharePoint Backup?

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Exchange 2010, Server 2008 R2

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