Performing Document Level Backups and Restores › Document Level Backup and Restore Benefits

Document Level Backup and Restore Benefits

Document level backup and restore offers many benefits, including:

• Complete Messaging Single Instance Storage--Traditional Brick level backups scan an Exchange Server mailbox-by-mailbox. They back up copies of individual message bodies and attachments as they arrive, without any regard for data that may have been backed up already and without accounting for the Exchange Server's ability to store only one copy of an attachment when it is sent to multiple people. This results in decreased speed and performance.

  Document level backup and restore solves this problem by providing complete single instance storage backups of attachments and message bodies. Document level backup checks to see whether each attachment and message body has already been backed up and backs up only one copy.

• Push Agent Technology--Document level backup uses push agent technology to increase the efficiency of your backup jobs by processing the data at the remote client workstations rather than processing it all from the Arcserve Backup host server. This offloads the system resources from the Arcserve Backup host server and minimizes network traffic.

  Push agent technology operates on a "per job" request, which means the host server sends an entire list of files to the remote client at one time. The push agent then enables the remote client to take an active role in the process by pushing all of the requested files to the host server. (Without push agent technology, backup jobs for remote clients operate on a series of "per file" requests—the host server has to request files from the remote client one file at a time.)

• Multi Threading--Document level backup lets you take advantage of the full capacity of multi CPU machines capable of concurrent operations. It does this by supporting up to 64 threads per storage group and an additional 64 threads in the public folder store for a maximum of 320 threads. This lets you make the most of your resources and increases performance. For information on how to configure the multi-threading settings number of threads and thread priority, see Configure the Agent For Document Level Backup and Restore.
• Multi Streaming Support--Document level backup lets you take advantage of the full capacity of multiple drives and high-speed RAID arrays capable of fast concurrent backups to multiple tapes. It does this by partitioning information into concurrent streams for parallel backups.
• Document Level Restore--Document level restore lets you select a storage group, mailbox database, public folder database, or even a particular document for restore.
• Migration Support--Document level backup lets you seamlessly back up and restore documents, folders, and mailboxes between different versions of Exchange Server, including Exchange Server 2003, 2007, and 2010. For more information about the guidelines on how you can restore from different versions of Exchange Server, see Document Level Restore Locations.
• Enhanced Cluster Support--Document level backup offers Active/Active and Active/Passive cluster support with cross cluster node failover.

  For document level operations on Exchange Server 2007 platforms, the agent supports Cluster Continuous Replication (CCR), Local Continuous Replication (LCR), and Single Copy Cluster (SCC) environments. For Exchange Server 2010, the agent supports backing up and restoring Database Availability Groups.

  Note: For more information about installing the agent on a cluster, see Configure the Agent to Run on a Cluster.

• Job Continuation--If a job fails to complete, under certain circumstances, document level backup can automatically continue where the first job left off. For information on how to configure job continuation, see Configure the Agent For Document Level Backup and Restore.

Note: The agent does not support backing up Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving data and Microsoft Personal Archives at document level granularity. Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving is a process of archiving Exchange Server 2010 SP1 and later mailbox data to cloud-based storage locations. Personal Archives is Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and later functionality that lets Exchange users create personal archives of their Exchange Server data. For more information about Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving and Personal Archiving, see the Microsoft website.

More information:

Configure the Agent to Run on a Cluster

Configure the Agent for Document Level Backup and Restore

Document Level Restore Locations