Not being able to restore specific messages easily was one of the reasons we 
moved away from Exchange 5.5.

I was by no means an Exchange expert, but I agree with Toni that moving to 
something UNIX based will make your life easier.

Sendmail, Procmail, Courier IMAP and OpenLDAP are being used now instead of 
Exchange. We're not missing the shared calendars and now whether or not our 
mail system is about to puke is one less thing I have to worry about.


The flexibility of having each message in a file (using Maildir) makes 
restores of specific messages or folders incredibly easy. The mailserver 
never has to go down, and I don't need to worry about making sure I'm using  
Exchange compatible backup software.



Just my 2 cents. Exchange 5.5 for me was always a ticking timebomb, as it was 
with the administrators before me. When things would break, all you had to 
work with were error codes that never matched anything on Google or the MS 
knowledgebase, and you're left with no other options than to call MS support.  
We wouldn't even consider Exchange 2003 because of that.


Chris


On May 26, 2004 08:34 am, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> Hello, amanda-users,
>
> until now I managed to get around these things, but today I was
> confronted with the question how to backup a MS Exchange Server !
>
> Ok, I know, it's something like:
>
> - stop exchange
> - dump exchange to file
> - start exchange
> - dump file to tape/disk with AMANDA
>
> But there was another thing I was asked and which is definitely
> offtopic in here, but due to the fact that I hope that someone has
> solved this already AND uses AMANDA I am not scared that much:
>
> As I have never seen such a server IRL, I can only tell you what I was
> told.
>
> MS Exchange seems to only be able to dump ONE BIG FAT dumpfile, from
> which you can only recover ALL the server.
>
> If you only need/want to restore SOME mails, this does not work.
>
> Correct me on this, it's hard to believe for me anyway.
>
> If I could offer these guys an AMANDA-based solution which would be
> able to restore single mails this would open some doors ;-)
>
> I will research on this on the web, but maybe someone in here already
> knows what to do and how ...
>
> Thanks a lot ...