Microsoft Exchange® requires a specialised method of backup and recovery, with the most recent (2003 and greater) being done through the Windows Snapshot Services framework in modern versions of Windows.

This article is meant to give you a brief overview of the backup and recovery concepts in Microsoft Exchange.

Quick exchange architecture overview

There are a few key components in an Exchange setup, these are:

• Exchange mailbox databases - Private and public folders & mailboxes for all users
• Exchange transaction logs - Records changes that are then committed to the mailbox databases. Allows for robust recovery after any sudden stop of the database.

Exchange transaction logs

Microsoft Exchange was designed to write all transactions to log files, then commit these changes to the main database.

Performance tips

• Store your Exchange transaction logs on a separate disk to the main database.
• Ensure that the write performance of the device can keep up with your expected load.
• Exchange 2003 wrote out transaction logs in 5MB files, Exchange 2007 writes out transaction logs in 1MB files. Good seek performance is important when dealing with many files.

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