Summary

Recovering from a disaster in Exchange Server 2003 involves a variety of different options. Exchange Server 2003 provides several ways to recover from a variety of different disasters ”not simply recovering an entire server in case of a major disaster, but also recovering information that was lost due to data corruption or simply because a user deleted a message or a folder. Disaster recovery takes several different forms and levels based on the recovery needs of the organization.

An important factor in any recovery is to have proper documentation on the configuration of the Exchange environment. Be sure to have documented server names , server configurations, and messaging routing information so that when a recovery process needs to be conducted , the administrators know the impact that a change in one site might have on other sites and locations.

When performing recovery of information in Exchange, the process needs to involve the isolation of the problem, whether the problem is specific to Exchange or is related to Active Directory or other network services. Because the Global Catalog in Active Directory is the core directory for Exchange, knowing how to recover the Active Directory Global Catalog is an important task for an Exchange administrator to understand.

And if the recovery process involves recovery due to database corruption, instead of jumping in and running Exchange utilities to repair the Exchange database, other alternatives can be used, such as migrating mailboxes off of production servers onto new servers within a site. The tools involve not only the Mailbox Move function, but also the ExMerge utility.

Finally, with tools such as the recovery storage group , the administrators of an Exchange environment can restore an Exchange database to a server without having to rebuild an entire server in the lab. Just restoring the data to a temporary server allows the administrator to extract the necessary information needed to recover information.

With all the tools available for recovery, an administrator of an Exchange Server 2003 environment has far more options available for recovery of a single message, folder, mailbox, or entire server than ever. By using the right tool for the right task, the administrator can provide a much better response to resolving Exchange server “related problems.