Installation guide

8 Backing up and recovering data of Exchange

clusters

The main idea of Exchange clusters is to provide high database availability with fast failover and no

data loss. Usually, it is achieved by having one or more copies of databases or storage groups on the

members of the cluster (cluster nodes). If the cluster node hosting the active database copy or the

active database copy itself fails, the other node hosting the passive copy automatically takes over the

operations of the failed node and provides access to Exchange services with minimal downtime.

Thus, the clusters are already serving as a disaster recovery solution themselves.

However, there might be cases when failover cluster solutions cannot provide data protection: for

example, in case of a database logical corruption, or when a particular database in a cluster has no

copy (replica), or when the entire cluster is down. Also cluster solutions do not protect from harmful

content changes, as they usually immediately replicate to all cluster nodes. By backing up the cluster

data with Acronis Backup, you can safely protect the clustered data: storage groups, databases,

mailboxes, and public folders.

Acronis Backup provides protection for the clustered data regardless of its placement within the

cluster. This means that even if the data being backed up changes its location within the cluster (for

example, if mailbox role is moved to another server due to a switchover or a failover), the software

will track all relocations of this data and safely back it up.

Cluster-wide protection is useful in the event some of the cluster nodes go offline, unless the

backed-up data becomes completely unavailable, or backup plan configuration explicitly prohibits

the protection to run on the remaining nodes (if you select to back up only the selected node, for

example).

8.1 Supported Exchange cluster configurations

Acronis Backup supports the following Exchange cluster configurations.