For example, if you only monitor your hub during the week and it crashes Saturday night, your machine will stay down unti l Monday morning if it doesn't have fault-tolerant features. Your UPS should be able to bring your machine down gracefully, thereby avoiding the corruption of data during a sudden power outage. While your tape backups should include the system software, e-mail programs, applications and any other configuration files, they should not include the actual messages. Backing up messages in the queues at that particular point in time will not serve much purpose. If you did back up the messages and then had to do a restore, any messages that were saved with the backup will be sent out again, confusing the messaging recipients because they received another copy of an old message.
Messages are too transient for doing tape backups.
A mirrored-disk backup would be a more logical method for keeping a backup of messages. An exception would be for those messages residing in a message store, which are a little less transient. Typically, if there are problems in sending messages, a good messaging system will hold the messages in queues until they can be sent. When doing backups, a second set of tapes should also be made. One copy of the backups should be kept near the hub machine and a second copy should be kept offsite.