How to back up your on-premises Exchange environment?

This post will elaborate the steps to back up all the items in your on-premises Exchange environment using RecoverManager Plus.

The solution allows you to schedule the backup activity at a specified time. However, before you configure a backup scheduler, you’ll have to add your Exchange organization to RecoveryManager Plus.

Step 1: Adding an Exchange organization to RecoveryManager Plus.

1. Log into RecoveryManager Plus console as an administrator.
2. Click the Account Configuration button located at the top-right corner of the screen.
3. Select On-premises Exchange tab.
4. Select the Server Type from the available options: Global Catalog and Exchange Server.
5. Provide the Server Name.
6. Enter the User Name and Password of a user who is a member of the Organization Management role group. The user name should be entered in the format "Domain\username".
7. If your server is an Exchange server, you’ll have the option to Enable SSL.
8. The user account used to configure the Exchange organization must have appropriate impersonation rights to backup and restore Exchange mailboxes. Select Grant Impersonation to provide the account with this privilege.

   Note: If this option is not selected, you can only backup and restore the mailbox of the user whose email address has been used to configure the Exchange organization.

9. Click Save.

Step 2: Creating a backup schedule for your On-premises Exchange environment.

1. Navigate to Exchange tab → Backup Settings.
2. Click the Create Backup button.
3. Select On-premises in the Exchange Type drop-down.
4. If you’ve configured multiple Exchange organizations, choose the organization for which you wish to create a backup schedule.
5. Provide a name for the backup schedule.
6. Select the mailboxes that you wish to back up by clicking the plus-icon. icon in the Select Mailboxes field.
7. To search for individual mailboxes, use the search-icon icon. After you’ve selected all mailboxes that you wish to backup, click OK.
8. Select the desired frequency at which the schedule must run from the options available.
   • Daily - Scheduler will run once every day at the scheduled time.
   • Weekly - Scheduler will run once every week on the specified day and time.
   • Monthly – Scheduler will run once a month on the specified date and time.
9. Select the Repository in which you wish to store the backups from the drop-down box.
10. In the Retention Period field, enter the number of days/months/years for which On-premises Exchange backups should be stored. Backups older than the specified age will be discarded. For example, if you've set the retention period to be 30 days, when the backup schedule runs on the 31st day, the items older than 30 days in the backup will be discarded. To learn more about how RecoveryManager Plus processes retention period, click here.
11. You can also configure RecoveryManager Plus to store your Exchange backups forever, in which case backups will not be discarded.

    Note: Minimum retention period for Exchange backups is 30 days.

12. Click Save to save the scheduler and the backup will run at the specified time.
13. Click Save & Run to save the scheduler and trigger the first backup process immediately.
14. Click Cancel to exit the configuration screen.

Your on-premises Exchange environment will now be periodically backed up, providing you with an option to restore them to any of their backed up states.

For a hands-on experience in handling RecoveryManager Plus’s on-premises Exchange backup capabilities, try our web-hosted version.

To download RecoveryManager Plus, click here.