Backing Up Exchange 2007 on Windows 2008

It has been suggested to me that my series on backing up Exchange Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008 was so complicated that the content was truly inaccessible for the novice admin. For that, I apologize. At heart, I am a techie kind of guy and I spend a lot of time trying to make complicated things easy – in my blog articles, my magazines articles, and in the presentations I make at various conferences.

So, to make up for that, without any technical discussion whatsoever, I present my GUI solution (still PowerShell based) for backing up Exchange Server 2007 on Windows Server 2008. With the exception of the forms-based handling, all of the technical infrastructure has been discussed here and in article preceding that article.

The GUI solution requires .NET 2.0, but that’s already installed on any Exchange Server 2007 computer.

To use the backup script:

  1. Download the zip file to a directory for PowerShell scripts on the Exchange Server you want to back up
  2. Extract the two files contained in the zip file into that directory
  3. Create (or identify) a directory where you want backups to go
  4. Identify the first free drive letter on the server
  5. Modify the MBS-GUI-Exchange-backup.ps1 script parameter block to insert those two parameters
  6. Execute the script (from PowerShell, move to the directory where you extracted the scripts and type in ./MBS-GUI-Exchange-backup.ps1)

That’s it.That’s all it takes.

Down the script MBS-GUI-Exchange2007-Backup.zip.

Just one tiny technical comment: if you are on Exchange 2003, it would be relatively easy to modify this script to use BEtest to execute VSS backups for Exchange 2003.

Until next time…

If there are things you would like to see written about, please let me know!


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