Designing and maintaining a highly available and resilient Exchange infrastructure is not just about DAGs, load balancers, and multiple servers. After all, what good is a DAG if the data gets corrupted and there is no way of recovering it?

Backups have been around for many decades. Disk failures, power outages, administrative errors, software and hardware errors, and many other causes raise the potential of data loss on any computer system. As long as data loss is a possibility, then backups are likely to be needed in order to be able to recover from most disaster scenarios. The introduction of DAGs and other features have enabled new possibilities, making administrators question their backup strategy and sometimes even the need for backups. Many already consider that backups are no longer needed. One thing is certain: Exchange is changing the reasons why administrators back up their Exchange environment and how they do it.