The first way to provide additional protection for the mission-critical mailboxes in your company is to partition the mission-critical mailboxes in your organisation in their own database.
If any of the mission-critical mailboxes are damaged, you can simply restore the database that contains those users' mailboxes. This makes restoring the damaged database easier and faster than having to restore a very large database of many users. It is also much easier to restore one database on a server than it is to recover a single mailbox from backup. For these reasons, you should locate your most important mailboxes (for example, the mailboxes of the executives of your company) in their own database.

Another way to protect mailboxes is to back up your mission-critical mailboxes using the Exchange 2000 EXMERGE utility. EXMERGE and other Exchange 2000 utilities are available on the Exchange 2000 CD-ROM, or from the www.microsoft.com/exchange Web site.

Use EXMERGE to back up mailboxes for individual users, and do this as part of your backup routine. EXMERGE backs up the .pst file for each user's mailbox. This utility can be configured to back up the contents of one or more mailboxes in your company. For example, you may only want to use EXMERGE to back up the .pst files for the executives in your company.

When you have an EXMERGE backup of a user's .pst file, you restore a user's mailbox by copying that user's .pst file on a specific location on that user's hard disk.

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Standard Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Premium Edition
• Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Standard Edition
• Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server