Hello members, What could be the best strategy to backup exchange 2003? Full+Incremental or Full+Differential, the frequency of it? and how long one should keep the backup. Thanks in advance.

I always recommend full daily backups because if you have to do a restore, you won't want to have to restore a set of tapes in the correct order, and you wouldn't want the risk of one bad tape fouling up everything after it. As to the retention period of backups, that is your own business decision. What might you be asked to restore? How much money do you want to invest in tapes?Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Thanks for the reply Ed Crowley. What if the backup is being taken to an external storage rather than tape? (The strategy) And also what would you recommend to be the retention period? or what do you follow ?

It depends on your org, full backups are best due to simplicity, but some orgs will do differential or incremental to save cost of tapes. If you're just doing external storage that's much cheaper. Retention period is up to you, you have to come up with an organziational a SLA agreement with your management and users and come up with a concensus first and take into consideration any regulatory mandates for retention and archiving. No one can give you a recommendation per se, ask yourself how far are you willing to go back to restore data for a user.James Chong MCITP | EA | EMA; MCSE | M+, S+ Security+, Project+, ITIL msexchangetips.blogspot.com

Hi, From the point of cost and convenience, the most common method is Full+differential in the enterprise because when making recovery, it is most convenient and only need 2 tapes, one for full backup and another for differential part backup. However, for Full+Incremental, it needs many tapes, one for full backup and others for everyday incremental backup. The best strategy relays on your business decision. If it emphasizes security and doesn't care for cost, full daily backup is necessity. ThanksSophia

For database disaster recovery, I think it is better to choose one reliable solution. There are many backup software on the market, acronis, to do backup, Nova. I have test the trial of todo backup, it offers one-click recovery system disk after disaster solution , you can check one which are versatility and relatively cheaper.

My advice is for Exchange 2003, by the way. For Exchange 2010 and a multiple server DAG, my advice would likely be different, even suggesting not doing backups at all.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."

Of course, to use that method you must have sufficient log volume space to hold all the log files between the full backups, plus a reserve in case backups fail until the problem can be remedied.Ed Crowley MVP "There are seldom good technological solutions to behavioral problems."