SBS Backup ‘Completes’ & Labeled Green ‘Successful’ – Exchange Information Store Database Is Missing

At the tail end of last week I discovered a SBS 2003 (R2) Backup ‘gotcha’ /bug that I think will affect others.  The triggering condition is a business has that been running the SBS Backup but didn’t initially configure Exchange.  Later Exchange is turned on by re-running the CEICW.  Furthermore the SBS Backup continues to complete and the Monitoring Report indicates that it is ‘complete’ and labeled a green ’successful’.  This is a false-positive in that the backup script is completing its tasks but is missing the Exchange First Storage Group database store backup.  Why?  The SBS Backup script is created upon running the SBS Backup Wizard.  Future wizard configuration does not in itself add the needed backup set.  Instead the SBS Backup must be fully disabled and then re-enable in order for the .bks script file to be rebuilt.

I discovered this situation by running the Exchange Best Practices Analyzer tool which reported that the Information Store database hadn’t a recent Full Backup date.