Keep It Simple and Consistent

One of the best ways to make sure that your disaster-recovery procedures are clear and easy to follow has always been to keep the process simple and consistent. Storage groups and multiple databases make attaining this ideal more difficult. When Exchange 2000 Server setup creates or upgrades your first database, the database usually has a name like priv1.ebd and belongs to the storage group First Storage Group. However, when you create a second database in this storage group, the default name is Mailbox Store 2.edb. The third database you create is Mailbox Store 3.edb, no matter which storage group it belongs to. I recommend that you plan the naming of the location and files before you create the storage groups and databases. To start, you might want to use some derivative of priv.edb. I’d suggest adding a number to the name to designate the file’s storage group, then an alphabetic suffix to distinguish the database within the group. For example, priv1a.edb and priv1b.edb belong to the first storage group and priv2a.edb and priv2b.edb belong to the second. No matter which naming scheme you use, keep the names short and simple and define them so that you can easily tell which storage group they belong to.