The Exchange Backup Challenge

An interesting article over at AME Info discusses the challenge of maintaining backups for Exchange mail servers. A big factor is that employees often feel free to mail even gigantic, multi-megabyte attachements without a second thought. That adds up to a lot of disk space over time that the administrator of the Exchange server has to cope with.

Though basically a pitch for using VERITAS backup products, the problem is not just hype. I know of one company where the Exchange administrators imposed a per-employee disk limit, and simply forbade employees to send mail once their email disk limit was exceeded on the server. Thus, key employees would come to work and find themselves unable to send critical email messages because other people had cc'ed them on messages containing huge attachments. It's always a sign of a flawed IT department when people can't get their job done because of rules designed to make the administrator's job simpler!

July 30, 2004July