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Why do I need an OFFLINE backup if I have a recent ONLINE backup?

Before continuing you should first understand the differences between an OFFLINE and an ONLINE backup.

Lucid8 HIGHLY recommends performing an Offline backup in addition to your Online backup routines.  By default an Information store is always inconsistent when it's up and running because transactions that have occurred are not yet committed to the database file. These transactions have only been recorded in the log files and or are still in memory. So an ONLINE backup database file is not truly complete at the point in time the ONLINE backup ended.  The problem with this is that it could lead to a "gap" in time and or potential loss of items if the ONLINE backup is used for a rollback.

During GOexchange maintenance the following takes place;

•    When a store is dismounted ALL of the transaction logs are committed to the database and its state is set to Consistent.

•   In Exchange Server, the transaction logs and the .edb and .stm files that go together are tied together by what's called a signature.  The signature lets Exchange keep track of which logs go with which databases.  Therefore it is not possible to replay logs into a different database, which would cause corruption.

•   When a GOexchange maintenance process is run it builds a new copy of the database, and that new database gets a new signature that no longer matches the existing logs, therefore any of the pre-existing logs would not be valid for replay into the new database.

•   If you have a hardware or power failure during maintenance, you may need to restore from this backup and since the OFFLINE backup contains the entire database and it should be in a consistent state you can easily roll back to the point in time before maintenance was started.

 If you have elected to utilize the integrated Offline Backup process then you do not need to take additional action, however if you are utilizing an unsupported Backup product then you should definitely create a manual Offline backup before continuing.