Chapter 5. Creating Backup Archives; General Information; What Is A Backup; Backup Types - ACRONIS RECOVERY - FOR MICROSOFT EXCHANGE Manual

Chapter 5. Creating Backup Archives

This chapter provides general information about backup types, describes how to
backup Microsoft
mailboxes/public folders, and which options can be set using Acronis Recovery for MS
Exchange.

5.1 General Information

Backup is crucial to maintaining a timely and consistent record of your Microsoft
Exchange servers for recovery in case of failure. Acronis Recovery for MS Exchange
offers an easy and flexible process for creation of backup archives.

5.1.1 What is a backup?

The concept of backing up data is based on copying it to a safe place to restore when
necessary. With an active database you need to backup and protect more than just
your database files and data. Databases include many components, such as transaction
logs, that must be backed up as well to make sure your data will be fully functional
after restoration.
Acronis Recovery for MS Exchange is a tool that backs up the necessary tables, data,
and user-defined objects, but it treats the database as more than just a combination of
files. When the backup procedure starts, Acronis Recovery for MS Exchange finishes all
the active transactions, makes a snapshot of the database and resumes the
transactions immediately. The database idle state is minimal and the backup will be
written to the archive location while the database is online.
Using this process to back up the database ensures that the restored copy will
be fully operational. Since the copy is made according to the snapshot, no
transactions made after the start of the process will be included into the
current backup.

5.1.2 Backup Types

Acronis Recovery for MS Exchange can create full and incremental backups for
comprehensive protection of your data from hardware failure, user errors or even
natural disaster.
A full backup contains all data at the moment of backup creation – a complete storage
group or mailbox/public folder. You can recover the entire database by restoring the
Exchange information stores, storage groups or even
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