Backup and Restore on different version of Exchange

[zipman]

Hello everybody,
I'm going to make a migration of an old infrastructure based on W2K3 to W2K12R2. On one virtual server there is Exchange 2003 installed and it has to be migrated to Exchange 2013... the official migration path is quite tedious (2 step upgrade), so I was wondering if it could be possible to make a backup of the Exchange 2003 Server and then restore all items on the new Exchange 2013 server.
Did anyone try the trick?

TNX
Flavio

[veremin]

Theoretically, you can request old U-AIR wizard, restore granular data into something like .pst and try to import into Exchange 2013 afterwards. But I doubt if that is going to be easier in comparison with Exchange in-place upgrade.

What I'd recommend is to backup an Exchange server (just in case something goes wrong) and perform in-place upgrade, even though the latter might be time consuming.

Thanks.

[homerjnick]

I just did the first step of an upgrade to Exchange 2010 from to Exchange 2003 and it ain't that bad at all. You can have them co-exist and just get everything right on your Exchange 2010 setup and then migrate mailboxes over at will. You then decomission the 2003 box.

You then simply rinse and repeat with Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013.

It is all a fairly straightforward process but yes a little time consuming.