Backup Exec 9 and Exchange 2003

So I had a bit of a panic attack over the weekend after our VP of IT called Friday to ask me to send him over a copy of our backup procedure. I had the procedure ready (in my head at least, just needed to put it to keyboard and paper) but I also realized that in our backup of our Exchange server, we were not doing mailbox backups.

We use Backup Exec version 9, and we are backing up the drives and the Information Store and the Shadow copy Components, but not the mailboxes and public folders. So, I started worrying and reading as frantically as I could. What I found after reading quite a bit and trying (and failing) some test backups was that I didn't need to backup the mailboxes.

According to the Help, "mailboxes and public folders are already included in the Exchange server database backups, but if you want to make the restore of a mailbox or folder easier, you can also select one or more mailboxes or public folders for backup seperately from the database." Now, ideally, I do want to backup the mailboxes seperate. However, until I get that figured out, I am still backing up the data and can restore it in the event of a failure.

Now, back to getting the account setup correctly so I can backup the mailboxes individually. . .more on that later.