Patent ID: 7155633

Claim:
A message storage system comprising: a network attached storage server; and an exchange server coupled to the network attached storage server through a network, the exchange server comprising: a rotating disk store; a solid state store comprising an exchange database; a computing engine coupled to the rotating disk store and the solid state store, the computing engine comprising: a scheduler having programmed instructions operable to instance an archiver and a software backup to execute alternately, the archiver having programmed instructions operable to relocate to a queue a first plurality of messages selected from the exchange database according to a criterion of age and further operable to relocate the first plurality of messages from the queue to the network attached storage server, the software backup having programmed instructions operable to partition the exchange database into a plurality of storage groups, and for each respective storage group comprising a second plurality of messages, to maintain a patch file and to copy a set of images of the second plurality of messages to a backup file, the patch file operable to record a plurality of transactions applied to the respective storage group throughout the period of the copying of the set of images.