Overview
Exchange Mailbox Level backups offer the ability to recover individual mail items in case of deletion or user error. Use this option to protect important employee mailboxes locally and to recover individual mail items. This option is best used when backed up local-only.
Barracuda Networks does not recommend using Mailbox Level backups as a disaster recovery method since restoring an entire information store via a Mailbox Level backup is much slower than from an Information Store backup.
If an entire Exchange environment goes down, restoring the Information Store takes substantially less time than restoring individual mailboxes or mailbox items.
Mailbox Level backup sets are best used as a data-archiving utility to keep a record of the emails sent and received (as well as contacts and calendars) over a long period.
General Considerations
With the version 5.6 upgrade, Exchange Mailbox Level backups:
- Use Exchange Web Services (EWS) that allow multi-threading.
- Can be restored directly to a (.msg) file or to an Outlook Personal Storage Table (.pst) file.
- Can be run from any computer with web access so the ECHOplatform agent does not need to be installed on the Exchange server.
The following application settings are required for Exchange Mailbox Level backups.
| Application | Required Settings |
|---|---|
| Exchange 2010/2013/2016 | Create a Service Account with the following permissions:
Disable EWS Throttling for all users. |
| Exchange 2007 | Create a Service Account with the following permissions:
|
The following server settings are required for Exchange Mailbox Level backups.
| Server | Required Settings |
|---|---|
| Windows Server 2012 |
|
| Windows Server 2008 |
|
The ECHOplatform agent software provides a series of validation steps to inform you if the user or the environment does not meet any of the necessary criteria.
Known Issues
The following table lists the known issues for Exchange Mailbox Level.
| Exchange Mailbox Object | Issue |
|---|---|
| Public folder | Public folder permission must be configured separately. Ensure you use the EditAll permission to avoid the following error message: Access is denied. Check credentials and try again. |
| Public folder item's property | EWS does not support directly setting the date and time stamp. |
| Email's, Meeting, Appointment, Task, Contact fields | Body and Note properties do not support RTF format, tables, WordArt, illustrations or images during restore to Exchange. |
| Meeting's properties | EWS does not support the following Meeting properties: Accepted, Declined Email, Tentative, Declined, New Time Proposed email, Current or Proposed. |
| Appointment's deleted occurences | EWS does not support updates to the Deleted Occurrences field. |
| Attachment's size | The limitation to attachments is 100 MB. |
| Outlook display after a restore |
|
| Outlook | Does not support Attachments in attachments. |
| Contact's business card | Not supported for restore to file or PST. |
Failing on GAL in Exchange 2007 or 2010
If failing on GAL in Exchange 2007 or 2010, perform the following steps.
- Confirm the mailbox is not hidden in Exchange, and then verify that IPv6 is turned on.
- With IPv6 turned on, modify your host file to contain an IPv4 address, so when you ping localhost you get IPv4 response back.
Backing Up Individual Mailboxes with the ECHOplatform Agent
To back up individual mailboxes and messages you must:
- Run the Backup Agent as a specific user that has a mailbox in Exchange.
- Provide the Backup Agent with domain administrator privileges.
The backup process works as follows:
- The ECHOplatform agent user logs into Exchange.
- The agent pulls the individual messages and items out of Exchange to a temporary folder that you designated in the software.
- The folder contents are bundled into zip files.
- The zip files are transferred to the Barracuda servers.
Specific Restrictions and Recommendations
After you validate all of the necessary steps in the software to perform Mailbox Level backups, you can select specific mailboxes for back up and choose a number of other settings, including:
- Auto backup of new mailboxes
- Auto exclusion of deleted items
- Auto exclusion of junk mail
- Attempting to back up hidden mailboxes
Because Mailbox Level backups are intended for archival purposes, Barracuda continues to retain messages as part of the backup, even after they have been deleted in Exchange. Users frequently use mailbox backups
mailbox backups to meet compliance standards, so Barracuda Networks does not have revision rules to remove messages nor stray file rules that dominate mailbox backups. You can manually delete mailboxes from the backup that you do not want.
Exchange Mailbox Level backups can overlap with Exchange Information Store backups since they use different processes.
Message Level Backups outside one million messages can take a long time depending on connection speed and bandwidth availability.
You can create smaller message level jobs to increase efficiency.
You cannot have Outlook installed on the backup server.