I admin about 50 users on the Sherweb.com cloud Exchange platform. After an experience today, where a mailbox was deleted accidentally, I discovered that Sherweb's recovery/backup practices only guarantee recovery of data older than 7 days. This means any emails/contacts/calendars/etc created more recently than 7 days ago would likely not be recovered at all. Since recent items are the most critical to these users, this type of backup/recovery is unacceptable, so I'm searching for an alternate way to back up these mailboxes. (Thankfully we were able to restore the user's mailbox by exporting everything from Outlook, as they had their Cached Exchange Mode set to "ALL", so the entire mailbox data existed on the user's local machine/OST file. I exported and re-imported to a new profile and they're back in business.)
Since I don't have access to the Exchange servers (they belong to Sherweb), is there a recommended way to automatically back up users' Exchange mailboxes on their local computers, or even to a third-party server/service?
I found the SafePST app, but I'm skeptical of a free app with poorly written English being used in an enterprise environment.
It seems the OST file is locked and can't be backed up until Outlook is closed on the local machine. Also, it seems the entire OST must be exported to a PST at once (no option for incremental backups?)
Is anyone aware of a way to either
1) Back up a cloud Exchange mailbox on the local user's PC automatically
-or-
2) Back up cloud Exchange mailboxes to a server or third party service
while performing the backup at least daily (preferably every 1-4 hours), and incrementally or at least with multiple available backups to restore from?
Incremental backups would be nice, as some of the users' mailboxes are multiple GBs in size. This would be prohibitively large for keeping multiple copies of each user's backup.
I would even entertain the possibility of setting up a separate server (local or cloud) just for backups, but that sort of defeats the purpose of the cloud-based Exchange mailboxes. Would prefer to run some sort of scheduled task or app on each client's PC to accomplish this.
Thanks for any tips or suggestions!