To perform an offline backup of Exchange 2000 databases, you must first dismount the mailbox and public folder stores before manually backing up Exchange 2000 database and transaction log files.
The following are advantages and disadvantages to performing offline backups.
Advantages to performing an offline backup:
- You can complete an offline backup in situations where an online backup might fail (for example, due to an error such as a checksum = 1018 JET_errReadVerifyFailure).
- Some third-party backup software does not use Exchange 2000 online backup APIs and requires the Exchange 2000 mailbox and public folder stores to be dismounted before backing up the server.
Disadvantages to performing an offline backup:
- You must stop database services.
- Log files that contain transactions already written to the databse files are not deleted following the backup.
- The database is not physically checked, which could cause damaged data to be copied.
- The chance of data loss is increased due to file manipulations.
- Users cannot send or receive e-mail or use public folders because their respective mailbox stores are dismounted. For this reason, you should perform online backups using the Windows 2000 Backup utility whenever possible.
An online backup allows the databases to continue running while you back up data. Users are not affected, and no processing jobs are interrupted.
For more information about performing offline backups, see Microsoft Knowledge
Base articles Q237767, ôXADM: Understanding Offline and Snapshot Backups,ö and
Q296788, ôXADM: Offline Backup and Restoration Procedures for Exchange 2000
Server.ö
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
