# NTBackup question



## mcseguy9 (Jun 11, 2001)

Hello everyone. I have a friend who has a small business. He runs Windows SBS 2003 and Exchange Server 2003. He's using NTBackup to backup his data and e-mail server information stores and logs. He has a full backup running weekly and incremental backups running the other six days of the week. He backs up to USB hard drives.

I was looking through the backup information and the event viewer and everything appears to be fine. There are no error messages, nothing in Event Viewer to indicate any problems with the backups, etc. However, when I go into NTBackup and look at what's available in the Restore and Manage Media tab I'm finding that the Exchange stuff doesn't appear to be backed up.

Looking at the full backup it does show the information store, and when I expand it I see Log Files, Mailbox Store and Public Folder Store. The problem is that they're all empty. When I click on each one all I see in the right window pane where the data should be visible is No entries found.

Obviously this is extremely bizarre because, as I said, there are no errors from the backup jobs running. Event Viewer says everything is working fine and the reports that I can view in NTBackup say the same thing. It's very bizarre.

Any ideas?


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## rhynes (Aug 14, 2006)

Haven't used ntbackup in years but if memory serves it does an all or nothing job. you can't just restore one mailbox, you have to restore the entire store. 

What you may want to consider doing is using a program like exmerge for backups, basically it'll export individual mailboxes to pst and you can back them up for individual users. Roughly how much email does the average user have?


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## mcseguy9 (Jun 11, 2001)

Thanks for the reply. I'll consider exmerge as an option if I can't figure this out. The total e-mail store is only about 11 gigs so each user on average would have maybe half a gig. There are plenty of users (a total of about 15) that don't use nearly that much, though. There are just a couple of user who use a lot of space (a gig each or so).


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## srhoades (May 15, 2003)

Just keep in mind exmerge has a 2GB limitation.


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## mcseguy9 (Jun 11, 2001)

rhynes said:


> Haven't used ntbackup in years but if memory serves it does an all or nothing job. you can't just restore one mailbox, you have to restore the entire store.
> 
> What you may want to consider doing is using a program like exmerge for backups, basically it'll export individual mailboxes to pst and you can back them up for individual users. Roughly how much email does the average user have?


I wonder how that compares to a backup with NTBackup. What I'm thinking is if the NTBackup is only good for restoring all mailboxes or if it also restores other things in Exchange. It sounds like exmerge just backs up mailboxes and nothing else. Is that correct? I think NTBackup, though all or nothing, backs up everything, or at least considerably more, with regards to the Exchange server. What are your thoughts?


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