we have single Exchange 2010 server with single 28Gb mailbox database file. Lots of historical emails. I'm working on backup solution now (uploading to cloud nightly etc), and uploading this huge file is unreasonable. What I thought would be great, is to "split" this file into 2 (or more) - similar to VM snapshot thing - one huge, read-only file which I can backup once, and then growing read-write file with current activity. Is it possible to do in exchange? May be that would involve creating 2 databases? Is it possible to have "read-only" database? Any ideas are very welcomed.
PS I know I can get a specialized backup application which will deal with it - but we are a very small company, and getting it is a bit of overkill, and expensive. I'm trying to see what my out-of-the-box options are first.
Why not create multiple mailbox databases and move mailboxes between them?
If your using Standard edition of Exchange 2010 you can have 5 mailbox databases.
28GB / 5 mailbox databases = 5.6GB mailbox databases.
One option is to use Windows Backup to backup Exchange, it's builtin in Windows Server and does not require any additional software, a best practice is to use a different server to protect yourself fron hardware fault.
Another option is to create an additional Archive Database, move the majority 'old' mail to users' personal archives stored in this DB and back it up for example on weekly basis, although it can't be related to as read-only since your users can manually move mail to their own archives at any time, so this solution is not completely reliable.