Exchange Server Backup

Protection of Exchange Servers is usually the most critical part of security policy of any company that has its IT infrastructure based on Microsoft technologies. By creating backups of Exchange Servers, you ensure business continuity and reduce the risk of losing valuable information and communication that takes place with your customers, partners and within your company. If you don’t back up MS Exchange Server data, its loss may result in short and long-term losses of time, money and clients.

Generally, MS Exchange is responsible for not only e-mail messaging, but also for collaboration, resource planning, etc. Therefore, backing up Exchange stores must be one of the first steps of any business continuity/disaster recovery plan, regardless of the area your organization works in. Let's try to list the main features that you should look at when choosing Exchange backup software:

• Compatibility. Undoubtedly, before purchasing a backup software it is important to make sure that it is compatible with the version of MS Exchange that you exploit. Many utilities on the market support Exchange 2003 backup, but can't be used to back up Exchange 2007. Besides version, it is critical that the software works on your server: for example, there are a lot of programs compatible with 32-bit systems only.
• Scheduling, storage and security options. Since Exchange Servers store and manage mission-critical information, backups must be made regularly. For the same reason, they must be available only to a limited range of people, so the software should support encryption, transferring data via protected protocols, etc.
• Control options. You need to be sure that your backups can be restored whenever you need. This doesn’t mean that you have to check each backup if it's been made correctly or not. But at least, the program should provide a complete log of all operations and give an explicit confirmation that everything was done error free. E-mail notifications can be very useful in this respect.

We hope that you will find these explanations helpful and they will let you choose the most suitable Exchange backup software for your company. We recommend you to try out the utility we produce, Handy Backup.