I am using BackupExec 2010 R3 and Exchange 2010. Full backups are taken weekly with a daily incremental.
When looking at the output of Get-MailboxStatistics, I have noticed that the value for TotalDeletedItemSize is only growing. I believe this value is not the Deleted Items folder in the mailbox, but items that have been permanently deleted (i.e., shift-del or items deleted/expired from the Deleted items folder).
I thought that when a Full backup was run that these deleted items would be purged. Am I wrong? Or is something broken?
Best Answer
When the full backup is taken using the Exchange agent it will backup the Deleted Items by default but it won't override the retention period settings in Exchange itself. It will delete the transaction logs up to the start of the full backup itself, but permanently deleted items still remain in the mailbox store until the retention period expires.
Symantec recommends (see here, despite it being old it still applies: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO73201) that you even set a retention period long enough for your needs and what your disk space can handle. This is because even they admit it is much easier to recover a deleted item within the retention period than to deal with restoring from an actual backup.
EDIT: For our "discussion" here's a screenshot EXAMPLE of the database tab showing the backup status: