Backup Selections

[Duke]

Hi all,

 

I've had a search and while I can see a lot of threads about what hardware to use for backups (tape, D2D, NAS, etc.) and what policies (weekly, daily, differential, incremental) to use, I can't find much about exactly what data to back up.

 

I'm trying to streamline our backups and break them down into logic jobs. A full backup for us is about 2.5TB so it's quite a lot of data to manage. Obviously things like user data are pretty simple, but I'm looking for information on more complicated application-level (Exchange, SQL, AD) backups. I've got agents for Backup Exec so can back up this data in an application-aware way, but sometimes I'm unsure how far to go with what data to back up.

 

For example, for the Exchange backup I'll obviously need to select the information stores... should I also do system state and the Exchange installation folder? Is it worth doing all of C:\Program Files and C:\Windows on that server? In the real world, if the hardware completely died am I realistically going to try to rebuild from that data, or am I going to build a new server, install Exchange and import my information stores? How do I backup all my Exchange configuration, rules, sender filtering information?

 

Has anyone seen any detailed whitepapers on this? The Symantec one on Microsoft integration is based around BE 12.5 (not really a problem) but isn't very detailed.

 

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[sukh]

for exch, you really want to backup the databases. Most of the other settings are in AD which will be recovered when using the /recover switch. I'd backup the systems state if you have any 3rd party certs but if you have this then dont worryy.