Microsoft Exchange Server is an extensively used email server solution in medium and large organizations. However, an Exchange Server can fail or crash due to hard disk failure, logical and physical errors, malware or virus infection, and other reasons. This can hinder business communication and other crucial processes and lead to prolonged downtimes.
Organizations must maintain regular, continuous backups of the Exchange Server to ensure business continuity. Preparing a proper backup strategy is also crucial to ensure that services and data are successfully restored with minimum downtime. In this article, we will be discussing some best practices for backing up the Exchange Server.
Below, we have mentioned some best practices you can follow to back up your Exchange Server.
Implement a Proper Backup Schedule
It is important to have a proper and planned backup schedule for the Exchange Server data and operating system. It will help the company keep a record and meet its regulatory and compliance requirements. Daily backups, weekly backups, monthly backups, and yearly backups to ensure that the server and data can be recovered within minimum time. The backup frequency is up to the company or as per the regulatory requirements.
Depending on the volume of data passing through the Exchange Server, an organization might opt to backup twice daily. In such a case, incremental, differential or reverse incremental should be considered for faster backup. The entire operation of the backups and what is being backed up must be fully documented and vetted by the responsible person or team.
Use Reliable Backup Solutions
Selecting a trusted backup solution for your Exchange Server is important – be it a virtual machine or a physical server. It will ensure the recovery of data and services when the need arises. The backup solution must be compatible with your Exchange Server version.
Talk to your IT professional and the software supplier before choosing the backup solution. Make sure the backup software is perfect for your requirements. You can also protect your data backups with encryption of AES-256 or similar. It will ensure that the backup, if leaked, is not readable.
Storage costs have dropped, but it can still be expensive. Choose a backup software that offers compression and deduplication of data. This will help utilize the storage properly.
Type of Backup Storage and Location
There are various types of storage, each with its advantages, disadvantages and costs. Companies can choose between local storage on a server, NAS or SAN, cloud, and tape. Depending on their needs or regulatory compliance, many companies opt for a hybrid model. Using multiple mediums provides extra protection.
Tape will give the option to take the backup and store it in a safe place at a distant location. It is also the cheapest backup solution, and modern tape is more resilient than many other forms of media. However, if handled badly, tape can be easily damaged. You may also have to replace the tapes periodically to ensure restorability. You also need to consider the hardware compatibility and availability of the tape drives.
A local backup on disks, SAN, or NAS will give better reliability as you can set up a RAID with fault tolerance and higher read and write speeds than tape. If the storage is on another site, you must ensure the data passes through a VPN-encrypted tunnel.
Backing up data on the cloud involves no maintenance cost. There is only the operational cost of the storage being used. However, it’s important to know the encryption and security of the cloud provider.
Perform Testing and Verification of Backup
As the saying goes, a backup is useless unless you can restore it. An effective backup policy has restore testing built into it. The general recommendation is to do a monthly test restore to ensure that the backup being taken can be restored. Some companies opt for a yearly full restore of the backup in a sandbox environment to ensure backup integrity and data consistency.
A disaster recovery plan document should be drafted and verified yearly. The plan should be tested in a sandbox environment, simulating a complete server or site failure and verifying that the data can be recovered in case of a disaster. The process must also comply with the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) set by the company.
Implement a Monitoring System
To ensure that the backups are executed successfully, implement a monitoring system. It should send email notifications when the backup fails for any reason. You can integrate the backup solution with the overall monitoring system so that the admins can be alerted immediately if a backup fails.
There can also be an automated system using Power Automate in the case of Office 365. Create scripts to analyze the email notifications and act upon them by sending an alert via SMS or other messaging system.
Conclusion
We have discussed some best practices for backing up the Exchange Server. In a disaster, the backup helps recover data and services in the least possible time and with the least possible impact on the business.
However, when recovering from a backup, you will lose data entered after the last backup. You can use third-party Exchange Recovery Software to recover data from corrupt EDB files. One such tool is Stellar Repair for Exchange, which can open such databases from any version of Exchange Server.
It can export the recovered EDB file data to PST and other file formats, and to a live Exchange Server database or Office 365. It can restore user mailboxes, archives, shared mailboxes, disabled mailboxes, public folders, and even deleted/purged items from corrupted database files.
Stellar Data Recovery is a leading data care corporation based in India, with presence in the US and Europe. The ISO 9001 & ISO 27001 certified organization specializes in Data Recovery, Data Erasure, Mailbox Conversion, and File Repair software and services. Our data care software products are known for their incredible ease, innovation, and value with practical features to fulfill both niche and broad needs of the users. Over the past 30 years, we have consistently organized our resources and efforts around developing innovative, future-ready solutions that are unrivalled on capability and built with the core purpose of enabling comprehensive data care for users in the consumers and enterprise segments.
