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Exchange Server 2010 Backup and Restore SDK

Exchange Server 2010 provides new and improved features that help to keep stored data secure and available. New features like Database Availability Groups (DAGs) enable off-site data redundancy and help ensure that Exchange customers won’t lose data. Many disaster recovery plans will continue to include more traditional backup and restore methods and systems. You can use the information in this SDK to create backup, restore, and recovery systems that use Exchange Server and Windows Server operating system technologies.

In This SDK

The Exchange 2010 Backup and Restore SDK contains the following sections:

  • What’s New — Summarizes documentation changes in this release of the Exchange 2010 Backup and Restore SDK.

  • Introduction to Exchange 2010 Backup and Restore — Introduces the technologies and features that Exchange 2010 and the Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) provide for creating backup, restore, and recovery systems.

  • Backup, Restore and Recovery Concepts — Describes the underlying concepts and mechanisms that are needed to create VSS-based backup and restore applications that work with Exchange 2010.

  • Working With Backup and Restore — Describes the ways that your application interacts with Exchange 2010 and Windows Server 2008 to perform database backup, restore, and recovery operations.

  • Reference — Provides detailed information about the Exchange 2010 database consistency check API that is provided in Exchange 2010. Backup and restore applications can use this API to ensure that databases and their log files are consistent before they are backed up. After databases are restored, applications can use the consistency check API to help ensure that Exchange can recover and mount the databases without problems.

What’s New in Exchange 2010 Backup and Restore

Exchange 2010 introduces several important changes that might affect your Exchange-compatible backup and restore applications, including the following:

  • The maximum number of databases that can be mounted on a single Exchange 2010 server has been increased to from 50 to 100.

  • Configuration settings for Exchange server databases are now stored in Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS).

  • Database mobility features, including Database Availability Groups (DAGs), provide more flexible and more reliable database replication. For databases in a DAG that has two or more healthy copies, the database consistency checking step can even be skipped.

  • Improved internal database integrity checking reduces the likelihood that any database corruption will be included in backup images. This helps reduce the need to take a database offline to perform consistency checking by using the CHKSGFILES API or the ESEUTIL application.

For more information about these and other changes, see Introduction to VSS Backup and Restore.

Backup and Restore Technologies and Features Removed from Exchange 2010

The following Exchange Server 2007 technologies and features are no longer available or supported in Exchange 2010:

  • Streaming database backup and restore.

  • Storage Groups. Each Exchange store database is managed separately in Exchange 2010.

  • The Exchange Recovery Storage Group. This has been replaced by the Exchange Recovery database.

  • Single-Copy Clusters (SCC).

  • Local Continuous Replication (LCR).

For more information about these and other changes, see Introduction to VSS Backup and Restore.

Development Technologies Removed from Exchange 2010

Some development technologies that shipped in earlier versions of Exchange Server are not included in Exchange 2010.

The following technologies were removed from Exchange 2007:

  • Exchange providers for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)

  • Collaboration Data Objects for Exchange Management (CDOEXM)

  • Collaboration Data Objects for Exchange Workflow (CDOWF)

  • Exchange Web Forms

  • At Functions

  • DAPI.DLL

The following technologies were removed from Exchange 2010:

  • Exchange OLE DB Provider (ExOLEDB)

  • Exchange store Event Sinks

  • World Wide Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV)

  • CDO 3.0 (CDOEx)

  • Item-level permissions

  • Exchange Store custom item types

These technologies are not documented in the Exchange 2010 Backup and Restore SDK. Any references to these technologies in the documentation are in error. For migration information, see the Developer roadmap for Exchange.