I am running a single exchange 2007 server with the client access, hub transport and mailbox roles.  I will in the future move thes roles to individual servers but thats for later.  I am looking for a open source or inexpensive soulution for backing up the mailstores on the exchange server at the mailbox level.  what i am doing now is using nt backup but that will not let me get past the the storage group level so i have to back every one up at the same time.  Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

I don't know what you consider 'inexpensive', but my employer, AppAssure Software sells an Exchange backup and recovery solution called 'Replay' that might suit your needs.  The SBS version is $995; if you're not running SBS the price is per mailbox.  

Replay backs up at the volume level, but the backups consist of only the blocks that have changed between snapshots, so you have the entire system protected but once you take the first snapshot all subsequent snaps are differential only.  Is there some reason you're looking for a product to backup specific mailboxes only?  That's not a requirement I've ever heard any of our customers mention.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the development lead on Replay, so obviously I think it rocks.

I would like to be as granular as possible with back ups.  I would prefer to be able to restore individual mailboxes instead of messing with the entire storage group.  Does you company offer a trial copy of this software?

FullAutoguy,
I don't know if this will help, but, we run our normal full backups for baremetal or SHTF purposes using Veritas.  In addition, I have 400G of ATA SAN space provisioned for ExMerge PST dumps of all the mailboxes in the stores every night. This gives me a quick and dirty way to restore messages quickly from individual mailboxes without having to restore an entire mailstore to a recovery server, without having to deal with tapes, and without having to deal with running brick backups within a backup product.  

With the low cost of storage these days, it's a nice thing to have.  

I run it for all the mailboxes, but if you were only looking to protect a few then obviously you wouldn't need a whole lot of space.  You can just set it up in a scheduled task with a script that calls your ExMerge.ini file with your options and you're good to go.

ETA: Just realized you said 2007.  For this you'd use the new Export-Mailbox cmdlet, same idea though.

Quoted: I would like to be as granular as possible with back ups.  I would prefer to be able to restore individual mailboxes instead of messing with the entire storage group.  Does you company offer a trial copy of this software?

Ah, so it's restore granularity you want.  Replay can restore the whole system, entire disks, entire EDBs, individual mailboxes, or individual messages.

We have a free trial on our website.  We have a couple of products; the one that does Exchange backup and recovery is called Replay for Exchange.  You can download a trial key from there.