In testing this with our original Exchange 5.5 deployment the brick level
backup and restore takes up far more resources than your typical MS Exchange
API backup. Let's say your Infostore on your 5.5 machine is 30gb in size.
Your backup will probably exceed double that size because every mail box is
backed up as a separate entity any items that are shared or any single item
that has multiple pointers to it will have to be backed up every time it is
referenced in an individual mailbox. Veritas Backup Exec and I believe
Netbackup does have a brick level feature. There are a number of others but
I don't have any experience with them.

Additionally, there are other products out there that will allow retention
of deleted mailboxes for a pre determined amount of time. They do require
integration into the Exchange environment and have to be managed. But that
does not protect you in the event of total server loss or historical or
legal requirements.

In our 5.5 site and during our testing of our Exchange 2000 deployment
environment it has proven to be far more beneficial to have 1 or 2 standby
servers that are used exclusively to restore infostores for legal or
recovery purposes.


Duane Ochs
Systems Administration
Quad/Graphics Inc.
414.566.2375