By: Deni Connor
Principal Analyst, Storage Strategies NOW

StorageCraft’s announcement of software that recovers and migrates Microsoft Exchange mailboxes and message stores is significant in that it adds essential data protection capabilities for SMB’s business-critical Exchange environments.

Market impact

Microsoft Exchange in the past few years has been viewed by many organizations as a business-critical application. End-users and business executives use Exchange as their personal database of contacts and as a chronicle of business events. Users spend as much as two hours each day with e-mail activities. Knowing that such a great deal of time is spent with e-mail and that it is such an important part of any business, it behooves an organization to protect their Microsoft Exchange environments and ensure that individual e-mails and mailboxes can be recovered quickly and easily.

To backup Exchange databases, many Exchange administrators perform two Exchange backups – one, a full backup of the database, and a second, brick-level backup of individual mailboxes – a time-consuming process, which is unnecessary, with the correct tools.

Further, many IT organizations are involved in migrations from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007 – a process they find usurious and problematic — often necessitating days or even weeks of time for Exchange administrators and downtime for the Exchange message repository. Often the migration process is feared and put off because of the nightmare situations a migration can cause.

The solution

StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange (GRE) allows IT administrators both the capability of an entire backup of the Exchange database and a brick-level recovery, without the need for creating two backups. It backs up Exchange database files (EDBs) and log files that contain the records of changes made to the database and what is sent and received since the last backup. GRE, in combination with ShadowProtect Server or ShadowProtect SBS (which may be bundled with GRE), takes a point-in-time copy of the Exchange server. Once the image format is mounted and a drive letter assigned, the administrator can launch GRE from a Windows desktop PC and search for specific mailboxes, e-mails and attachments. All this can be done without a live Exchange server being present.

Once the administrator determines the deleted email, mailbox or attachment they want to recover, GRE provides a mechanism for retrieving them to the live production server without taking the server down. Alternately, the messages can be saved to a .PST file, as well.

Migrating from one version of Exchange to another is also an easy process with GRE. Administrators simply bring the new Exchange server online and drag and drop e-mail boxes from the old server to the new one.

SSG-NOW Assessment

ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange complements StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect Server and its ShadowProtect Small Business Server to give small and mid-size businesses a comprehensive recovery environment for their business-critical applications and file servers. The product, which works with all versions of Windows, also offers reports that help administrators manage the Exchange environment – deleting redundant emails and attachments and minimizing storage utilization. In addition, it’s search capabilities allow administrators to specify criteria for the messages or mailboxes they want to retrieve, making the product a shoo-in for SMBs that must recover and protect their Exchange environments.

For more information visit:
StorageCraft.com: Granular Recovery For Exchange