My pennies worth is that NTBackup does a fine job for a free product.

Paying money would point me towards Backupexec v8.5. Although Arcserve is an equal product in its functionality the tech support and licensing process could be better! and Backupexec has a longer history of designing for NT including the scaled down version that ships with W2K.

Brick backups within the products are a major faux pas considering you can implement a holding place for deleted items in Exchange. Don't quote me on this but the original concept of brick backs was a design feature for small NT shops (<100); unfortunately some organization thought this could cope with a magnitude far above this. Having to break into every single mailbox with a client API is a chore and shows in the speed of backup and peoples experience.

If your going for multiple sites with multiple operating systems and you have the cash then there is no finer product than Legato but you have to pay.

Backup is a classic scenario of horses for courses.

Another point is any Exchange administrator should read Disaster Recovery part I & II before even considering a backup scenario. Especially with the differing backup strategies that 3rd party vendors require.

I have been involved with Exchange since the people where migrating from MS-Mail 3.5.

yours sincerely,

Sean McGilligan