Microsoft Exchange 2010 backup setup & best practices (advanced edition)

  1. Open CyberSecure Advanced by right-clicking the system-tray icon and choosing “Open”
  2. Open the backup settings from the main console
  3. Click the “plus” sign to add a new backup set
  4. Type a descriptive label and ensure that the backup set type is set to “MS Exchange Server Backup” and the version is set to “Microsoft Exchange Server 2010″
  5. Next, select the Information Store and databases to protect
  6. The schedule screen is next.
    1. If you are performing data seeding, REMOVE all schedules to turn off the automatic backup to CyberSecure’s servers.
    2. Circular logging must be disabled on all databases within the backup
    3. The recommended backup strategy is a FULL weekly backup, and weekday INCREMENTAL backups.
      Note that both of these backups will only send the block-level changes, thanks to the delta-matching algorithms within CyberSecure.
  7. To setup the recommended backup schedule, remove all existing schedules so that the schedule dialog looks like this:
  8. Now add the weekly FULL backup schedule
    1. Click Add
    2. Populate the weekly schedule as shown in this screenshot, then click OK
    3. The weekly schedule will be shown
  9. Now add the weekday INCREMENTAL schedule
    1. Click add
    2. Populate the weekday schedule similar to the weekly, just with incremental backups and weekdays
    3. Click OK to return to the schedule screen – confirm that both schedules have been added
  10. Our recommendation is to leave the encryption settings at their defaults, which will use your account login password as the encryption password. Once the encryption password is set the only way to change it is to recreate the backup set.
  11. Enable delta merge – delta merging increases the efficiency of backups on structured data such as exchange.
    1. Follow our delta merging guide to enable delta merging on this backup set
  12. The final step is to change the location of the temporary spooling folder. This is the “staging” area where Exchange spools out it’s databases before being compressed and encrypted to CyberSecure’s servers.
  13. In settings, make sure the exchange backup set is selected and click “Options”
  14. This location must have enough free space to hold your selected exchange databases for the duration of the backup.
    1. Don’t use spaces in the location folder names if possible – paths are always easier without spaces
    2. If the spooling location is being set to a network location, ALWAYS use UNC pathnames (e.g. \\NAS-DRIVE\backup\Cybersecure-spool) instead of a mapped drive letter. The reason is that windows mapped drives exist only within the session in which they were created, so when the user logs out of the system, the mapped drive will disappear.
  15. Click “Change”
  16. Select the location of the spooling folder, we recommend calling it “cybersecure-spool”
  17. That’s it – OK out of everything and save settings back at the main screen