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General discussion

Automate Backup of hosted Exchange email accounts

Jul 6, 2006 9:20PM PDT

Hi,
I have a small hosting business. I resell hosting and email solutions. I have resold exchange email services to a number of clients. I recently discovered that the host I use does not provide the sort of backup restore services I'd expect when large amounts of email data was recently 'lost' from a clients mailbox.

I want and need to provide a more resilient and secure service that my clients can have faith in and want to backup inidivual exchange acocunts myself. I'm currently doing this manually.

My question is whether anyone knows of an application/utility that can do this in an automated way. I currently enter the exchange mailbox login details into an outlook profile, allow the account emails/data to sync, then perform a .pst export. I'm looking to do it once a week at least or every day if the solution can overwrite the previous backup etc.


I'd appreciate any ideas or suggestions for this solution or points in the right direction of a vendor for this application.

Thanks.

Discussion is locked

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Link only.
Jul 7, 2006 12:15AM PDT
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Hosted Exchange backup / local OST/PST backup
Jul 25, 2011 11:04AM PDT

A lot of hosted Exchange providers miss the trick of offering backup as a service - of course we all need a local backup in case the provider fails one day, never mind recovery of email deleted by user error.

Options:
1. sell a good incremental client backup capable of backup of open OST/PST files
2. combine your manual Outlook profile trick with suitable automation software - so that profiles can open sequentially over night to sync with Exchange server, then have an incremental backup of your workstation computer with the OST/PST files closed.
3. Pay more: rent a virtual server so that you can run Exchange backup software of your choice, though this may result in you doing the server maintenance, something you may not want.
4. persuade the hosting company to sell a new service: incremental sync of server data to a file server local to you, so that you can check successful daily backup; need to tell them that they are missing profit and communicate how much your customers are willing to pay for this extra service.