It's been long time ago, but I will give it a try...


Yes, that has changed since release 3.x (before that that savesets used to be All for Exchange).


Yes, but nowadays people tend to backup information store only and restore them from there (via storage groups in EXCH2003 I think or via standby Exchange box and then sync it back to original box).


Correct.


I'm afraid you will need advice from Exchange backup admin or someone else, but I would say MSEXCH full backup once a week and IS or SGs backups each day.


That approach uses old MAPI and it is very slow and from what I have seen no one really uses that (even Legato used to say you should not use it if you have large number of mailboxes - simply pick most important ones otherwise you will need to schedule them in groups and do backup at different times).

Yes, I was talking about RSG, but I have no idea if single mail can be restored from that - sorry. Perhaps someone else who tried that before can share more light.

Classic approach for single mail includes MB saveset. Here is link to thread we had in past:
http://forums.emc.com/forums/thread.jspa?forumID=68&threadID=28486

Thanks for the tips!



I don't have the option of a standby box currently. Is the other option I you are talking about the Recovery Storage Group (RSG)? Does that allow me to restore at the granular level of userx->mailbox "foobar" ->Message Subject "Foo"?

My main concern is how to handle requests of "Oops, I purged this mail & It's gone now, can you recover it for me?

In an RSG you will mount the whole recovered private mailbox store. You will be able to see all of the mailboxes inside of it via Exch Admin but you cannot connect to any of them via Outlook or OWA. This is fine since what you'd want to do is us Microsoft's "exmerge" tool to extract one (or more) mailboxes to a PST file. From there you can pick and choose what you want to merge back into the production mailbox store.

RSG in E2k3 almost totally removes the need for a separate "recovery server".

Ryan McFee
(on borrowed credentials, sorry)

One note on this - your Exchange database is a database of all mail files received which avoids, say someone sending a message to 100 people on that Exchange server having that message stored 100 times. When you do a mailbox backup the agent will go through the Exchange database for that mailbox and pick out the necessary e-mails - which means (1) you back up the same data many times if you back up every mailbox and (2) it takes a seriously long time to do! It is only practical for a small company with a small amount of mailboxes.

If you feel you must to mailbox backups the best recommendation I have is to backup the mailboxes of those people who will fire you if you are not able to recover it in a reasonable amount of time!