Paul,

Whatever fancy hardware you buy, an Exchange bricklevel backup will be
limited at around 5 MB/sec. A store backup on the other hand can be very
fast, depending on your hardware. I achieved 70 MB/s once at a customer
with a well-tuned SAN.

The most used solution is to break up your Exchange database in several
smaller databases and to use the recovery storage group. You basically
restore the complete storage group that a certain mailbox belongs to,
then move it form the recovery storage group to the production storage
group.

This is only possible with Exchange 2003. If you are using Exchange
2000, you can split up the storage groups, but there is no recovery
storage group, so you have to restore to an alternate location, then do
an Exmerge or something. If you are using Exchange 5.5, you are screwed.
Well, you can do the same trick but you have to recover the complete
database to a standby server, then perform the Exmerge. You finally
found a function for that old server in the corner of the computer room.

There are several third party products that provide increased recovery
options for Exchange data. Several of them are actually very clever, but
they all cost money and extra hardware. Just how important is your data?

Regards,

Marcel