Benefits of the Messaging Dial Tone Strategy

There are several good reasons to use a recovery strategy such as the Messaging Dial Tone strategy, in which you swap databases before using ExMerge:

• The amount of data that must be merged is minimized. The dial tone database contains only a few hours or perhaps a few days of data. It is usually much faster to merge this small amount of data to the original large database than to merge a large amount of data to the small dial tone database.

• The final database size will be less than if you merged the original data. If you swap databases, single instance storage of the majority of messages will be preserved. If ExMerge processes a message sent to multiple mailboxes, it merges a separate copy of the message into each mailbox instead of all mailboxes sharing a single copy. In addition, messages that ExMerge inserts into a database may be larger than the original versions because of format conversions.

• The original mailbox rules, forms, and other ancillary data will be preserved in the state they were in before the disaster. Among other benefits, users will not have to modify rules that move messages to custom folders, and Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 offline and cache mode files (.ost files) will still work.