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I've got two questions about backing up Exchange 2010 with Microsoft Server Backup.

So Microsoft have this article about Using Windows Server Backup to Perform a Backup of Exchange.

In it they say, Install Server Backup feature. Ok, done. Then start a Backup Once .. ok .. starting that...

Then it says .. recommended to do a FULL backup.

So, my question is this:-

doing a full backup will backup, like everything on that drive. System files, other files .. the works, right?

What happens if i just want to backup the Exchange email? how can i do that?

Secondly, If i do a full back, will it format my destination drive? For me, i have a 500Gig secondary storage drive in that unit. I have data on that drive. If i do a full backup, will it zap the existing data BEFORE it backups the current?

Last (and this is the weird bit). my C/System drive has around 40Gig being used. 35 odd is free. All my programs/exchange data is on that (note: please avoid replies about bad practice, etc). When i see the option for a FULL backup, it says it will take 112G of space. What the? that's like .. 3x the size of my used data on C drive right now... is that right?

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1 Answer

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1) Doing a full backup will grab everything on the drive if it is just one volume. If you have more than one volume on the drive, you can pick only one of them via the Custom backup option.

2) Windows Backup does want to format the destination drive on any full backup, and it will do so before it writes the current full backup.

3) Not sure about the size issue - that is odd.

It looks like what Exchange 2010 gives you is a Volume Snapshot Services provider to allow you to snapshot the volume and get a consistency check of the Exchange data before backing up.

I think for a "Backup only Exchange data" solution you would need a 3rd party solution like Symantec, CommVault, etc.

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+1 for backups grabbing everything. Assuming this is Server 2008, a full backup should give you 3 options for the destination drive. You can dedicate a disk to the backups, which would format the drive. You can just save the backups locally to a folder stored on the drive, which should not overwrite anything. You can also back up the data to a network share, which will also not format the destination. For the remote option, you can only have a single backup, so a previous backup would be overwritten. Performance is best with a single, dedicated drive, but you should have these options. – Paul Kroon Oct 4 '10 at 23:54
@Paul Kroon - if i don't want my destination drive to be formatted, but to a folder on my destination (D:/ drive) .. any links how this can be done? i don't want to frak up my destination drive while trying to figure out which options to do. – Pure.Krome Oct 5 '10 at 1:02
@Pure.Krome - Check out here: searchsystemschannel.techtarget.com/generic/…. This is also a great walk-through I first used when setting up our backups: simple-talk.com/sysadmin/exchange/…. If you don't see the options in the first link for destination type, I just realized they might be Server 2008 R2 features and I don't think you said what OS you're running. – Paul Kroon Oct 5 '10 at 1:14
I'm using W2k8 r2 :) – Pure.Krome Oct 14 '10 at 4:35

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