Designing a backup less Exchange 2010 Architecture

Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 features a new platform for high availability and site resilience that makes deploying redundant and highly available mailbox databases easier than before. But even the most extreme forms of redundancy and fault tolerance can't protect against every possible failure or disaster. Ensuring there's sufficient protection for the critical data in the Exchange organization is a necessary operational task for all organizations.

As part of data protection planning, it's important to understand the ways in which data can be protected, and to determine of those ways, which best suits the organization's needs.

Exchange 2010 provides native data protection that eliminates the need to make traditional backups of your data. The following table helps to decide whether you need to continue utilizing a traditional backup model or whether you can implement the native data protection features built within Exchange 2010:

Logical corruption is typically a scenario that requires a PIT backup. However, with Exchange 2010, there are several options now available that can mitigate the need for PIT backup:

• With Single Item Recovery, if the user changes certain properties of an item in any mailbox folder, a copy of the item is saved into the Recoverable Items folder before the modification is written to the store. Therefore, if the modification of the message results in a corrupted copy, the original item can be restored.
• The Calendar Repair Assistant detects and corrects inconsistencies that occur for single and recurring meeting items for mailboxes homed on that Mailbox server so that recipients won't miss meeting announcements or have unreliable meeting information.
• During mailbox moves, the Mailbox Replication Service detects corrupted items and will not move those items to the target mailbox database.
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 introduces the New-MailboxRepairRequest which can address corruptions with search folders, item counts, folder views, and parent/child folder issues.

Note that several of the mitigations mention PIT backup. A PIT backup can be either a traditional backup, or a lagged database copy. Both provide the same capabilities; however, the choice between the two will depend on your recovery SLA. The Recovery SLA will define the Recovery Point Objective (in the event of a disaster the data must be restored within a certain timeframe of the disaster), as well as, how long the backups must be retained. If the recovery SLA is 14 days or less, then a lagged database copy can be utilized; if the recovery SLA is greater than 14 days, then a traditional backup must be used. For the rogue administrator and corporate/regulatory compliance scenarios, the PIT backup typically is Isolated and maintained separately from the messaging infrastructure and messaging IT staff, which dictates a traditional backup solution.

Thanks to Ross for assisting me on this document.

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 20, 2011
  A very nicely written and useful article.

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2013
  We are pleased to announce the RTM availability of version 9.0 of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning

• Anonymous
  December 18, 2013
  I’ve written a few blog posts now that get into the deep technical details of Managed Availability. I

• Anonymous
  December 26, 2013
  Recently I was involved in a Private Cloud project and as part of the project, we were migrating some

• Anonymous
  January 14, 2014
  Recently, we have seen some questions about what the Update-DatabaseSchema cmdlet in Exchange 2013 is

• Anonymous
  January 30, 2014
  This has been a great new feature added in Windows Server 2012 R2. The possible scenario of the usage

• Anonymous
  February 09, 2014
  Many users rely on their smart phones and other mobile devices to access their email and calendar using

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  February 25, 2014
  With Exchange 2013, we released a new data loss prevention (DLP) capability based on deep content analysis

• Anonymous
  February 26, 2014
  Exchange Server 2013 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is now available for download! Please make sure to read the

• Anonymous
  March 05, 2014
  This article is part 2 in a series that discusses namespace planning , load balancing principles, client

• Anonymous
  March 10, 2014
  Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 entered the market on September 28, 2003 and continued the great messaging

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  March 20, 2014
  Now that we understand the load balancing and namespace planning principles and how clients connect in

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  April 18, 2014
  We’re happy to announce updates to the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant ! These updates offer you

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  April 21, 2014
  During my session at the recent Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC), I revealed Microsoft’s preferred

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  May 02, 2014
  With the huge scale environment I currently work in my team has had some difficulty when it comes to

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  May 25, 2014
  I recently did an Exchange 2013 deployment at one of our customers and also integrated with ADRMS so

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  June 18, 2014
  In the last week there have been two big improvements related to CalCheck and OffCAT that will make life

• Anonymous
  June 18, 2014
  I was recently helping a customer in ADRMS design and deployment where we faced an issue with ADRMS URL

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  June 27, 2014
  We are pleased to announce the availability of version 9.1 of the Microsoft Assessment and Planning

• Anonymous
  July 02, 2014
  Recently I was working for ADRMS integration with Exchange which is rather simple however it became quite

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  August 11, 2014
  Probes are one of the three critical parts of the Managed Availability framework (monitors and responders

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  August 19, 2014
  In the last related blog post we gave some introduction about Exchange Online Protection (EOP), what

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  August 26, 2014
  The Exchange team is announcing today the availability of our most recent quarterly servicing update

• Anonymous
  September 16, 2014
  Occasionally I am asked the following question – how can I protect the messaging environment from a rogue

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  September 28, 2014
  Bulk mail is often mistaken for spam and is starting to become a larger problem for organizations. EOP

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  October 20, 2014
  At The Official Microsoft Blog , we revealed more details about our unified technology event for event

• Anonymous
  October 25, 2014
  We recently released updated versions of both the Exchange 2010 Server Role Requirements Calculator and

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  November 09, 2014
  What are we talking about today? In Exchange 2013 CU5 (yes 5, V, cinco, fem, and cinque) we started implementing

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  December 31, 2014
  I was recently working with a customer helping them migrate to the Eliminated state of Sysvol migration

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  January 13, 2015
  Back at the release of Exchange Server 2013 CU1 we made some necessary changes to the way OWA logoff

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  This morning we published the first look at the Ignite session catalog providing you a better view of

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  February 08, 2015
  Sometime ago, I wrote a blog about upgrading from Windows 2003 based Active Directory to Windows 2008

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  February 09, 2015
  Exchange team has written below blog on the remote connectivity analyzer tests for mail flow testing

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  February 09, 2015
  Exchange team has released a blog about Office 365 best practices analyzer for Exchange 2013 as below

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  February 09, 2015
  Exchange team has written a blog about new Exchange Server deployment assistance as below:
  We’ve

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  February 09, 2015
  After a long wait, the calculator is there. The calculator recommends mailbox and CAS sizing as well

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  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team blogged about post TMG world. R ead the blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive

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  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team blogged about OffCAT as below:
  On Friday, July 19, the OffCAT team released OffCAT version

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  Read the blog at http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2013/07/16/owa-for-iphone-and-owa-for-ipad

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team has released Hosting and Multi-Tenancy Guidance for Exchange Server 2013 document. It is

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  The Exchange team has released the following update rollups to the Download Center. All three releases

• Anonymous
  February 13, 2015
  Exchange team has released a fantastic blog about publishing Exchange 2013 with TMG server.
  Review

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  February 15, 2015
  You can protect your organizational Units from accidental deletion by using Power Shell scripts to apply

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  March 23, 2015
  I was recently working with a customer where one of their Active Directory would not replicate. They

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  April 24, 2015
  Recently Microsoft Exchange team has written a blog about large messages in Office 365. I see many customers

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  June 30, 2015
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  In a recent project I was working on ADFS with multiple applications and customer also had SAP to be

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  December 13, 2015
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  March 08, 2016
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