dir_services.jpgOne of the things I like about MailStore is the simplicity with which local users can be managed, so I wanted to take a moment to provide you with an overview of the various options available to you in this area. Before I start, I should point out, that for each member of staff having their email archived, an account must be created in MailStore and a user licence allocated. One option is to create accounts manually within MailStore, entering the relevant information for each, which will typically include passwords, email addresses and access rights. This works perfectly well for smaller installations, but when dealing with more than a handful of user accounts it does start to make more sense to consider synchronising your MailStore user list with an external user directory service.

mailstore-proxy.png I don't often get asked about the MailStore proxy, as most of our customers tend to use a local email server of some kind such as MDaemon or Microsoft Exchange where it's not needed. Every so often however, I'll be asked about creating a centralised archiving solution for an off-site POP3/ SMTP service which is where it provides a simple but effective solution. Typically customers using these services will have have been using simple, user-based archiving such as the manual creation of local PST files which may or may not be include in a wider backup strategy - by no means an ideal solution.

Since the introduction of Microsoft’s Volume Shadow Copy Service in Server 2003 it is common to backup the Exchange database in its entirety as part of a bare-metal backup job. This is a great way to deal with a disaster such as a hard drive failure where you want to recover a whole server, or even if you need to recover the whole Exchange database back to a point in time.  The difficulty comes when you want to recover, for example just a single mailbox, or even specific emails.  With a full backup, you are backing up the entire database which means you’ll need to recover the full database first to a temporary location, mount this as a recovery database, connect to it with a client and then extract the data.  With a large database this could take quite a lot of time and resources to complete. BackupAssist has a much easier, more convenient way.