Hi
I'm invesitigating how best to back up our Exchange 2010 servers for a worst case DR scenario. We have 2 virtual and 1 physical servers in a DAG and the scenario is that our building has burned down and we are at a 3rd party DR site with only our backup tapes. We have a virtual environment and a SAN at our disposal and we can quickly restore one of our domain controllers. Now we have to restore the Exchange 2010 servers and the mailbox databases.
I have tried to build a new Exchange server in the DR environment using the RecoverServer switch but it fails as the DAG is missing. I think this method is for where one server is missing from the DAG so doesn't apply here. So I looked at backing up the Exchange servers themselves and restoring them first but Microsoft are very clear about not using snapshot syle backups on Exchange servers which our current technology does.
I have a few questions:
1. Can Data Protection Manager 2012 be used to backup the entire Exchange server i.e the OS, Exchange binaries, databases and log files so that the complete server could be restored?
2. I can understand why snapshot style backups can't be used on the databases and log files but does this also apply to the server OS, Exchange program files etc? I'm wondering if I can restore a server and then restore the mailbox databases.
Thanks!