About using recovery points to restore individual Exchange items to a point in time

As part of the continuous protection of Exchange, you can enable Backup Exec to make recovery points at intervals that you specify. Recovery points create backup sets that you can browse from the Restore view. You can recover individual messages or folders from a point in time when either a full backup or recovery point was run. Each time a recovery point is made, it also truncates the transaction logs so that log growth is controlled.

Recovery points start to run at the specified intervals after the recurring full backup has started. However, recovery points do not run if the full backup is active. The recovery points start running again at the specified interval when the full backup has completed. Replication of the transaction logs is continuous, even when the full backup is active.

The recovery point only affects Exchange resources in the backup selection list. Resources that are not related to Exchange, but are in the same backup selection list, are not affected by recovery points.

Performance impacts of setting recovery point frequency for the Information Store transaction logs include the following:

Table: Results of changing the default interval for recovery points

Making recovery points	Results
If recovery points are set to occur more frequently than the default rate of every 8 hours	The following may occur: The Job Monitor view and the restore selections list may become crowded and difficult to read. The performance of the Exchange server may be slower than when the recovery points are set to occur at the default rate.
If recovery points are set to occur less frequently than the default rate of every 8 hours	Transaction logs are also deleted less frequently and therefore use more disk space.

Recovery points can only be created as part of the continuous protection strategy. If you choose not to use recovery points, individual mail messages and folders can only be recovered from the last full backup.

Caution:

Transaction logs are deleted when recovery points occur. This may affect other Backup Exec jobs for the Exchange Server, or other jobs that are created by third-party applications.