Cached Exchange Mode Fault Tolerance

Any good administrator will tell you that you should always back up your system, test your backups, and have enough redundancy in place to prevent catastrophic failures from disrupting mail flow. In the real world though, these best practices aren’t always followed. Budget cuts and lack of training sometimes lead to subpar Exchange Server deployments.

I once received a call from a client whose Exchange server had catastrophically failed. I discovered that the hard disk containing the database had died, and it was in such bad shape that the data was unrecoverable. The Exchange server had never been backed up. . . .