Reasonable Microsoft Exchange Limits and Sizes - what do you use/recommend?

[curioffl]

We have an Exchange 2007 server with 25 users and basically no limits on them (we are not automatically expiring "Junk Email" for instance, and have a 4-gig default limit).

 

Lately our Retrospect Exchange addon backups (to disk) take about 20 hours (for a recycle backup, grooming was taking even longer on an append and daily groom scheme) (both boxes are fast and on fast ethernet connections) and are error prone (many errors are simply things that have changed since Retrospect started each user since 20 hours ends up running in a good part of the work day).

 

What are some more reasonable limits on Exchange and/or what do you do? (I realize that is a bit more of a general Exchange question, but I really not sure that we can continue to backup Exchange with Retrospect in any meaningful way at this point.) Additionally we are planning to migrate another dozen or more users to our Exchange.

 

Are there better strategies inside Retrospect for handling bigger sizes? (I was thinking that I might run a recycle backup every Saturday and then do normal backups through the week, hoping that the normals would be faster... but I am not sure with the massive massive catalog files that Retrospect will have to sort through whether that will be any help).

 

Thanks.