9.9 Creating an Emergency Repair Disk

Chapter 9 - Backup and Recovery Operations
Monitoring and Managing Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server
by Mike Daugherty
Digital Press ?2001

9.11 Recovering a single mailbox or message

Sometimes, users delete important messages (or their entire mailbox), and they may come to you to recover the deleted items from the backup tape. Unfortunately, retrieving a single mailbox or a single message is not a simple process. Thankfully, there are often ways to avoid having to recover the data from the backup tape.

When an Outlook user deletes a message, the message is moved into the users Deleted Items folder. Often, the user can recover the missing items by looking in this folder. Even after the Deleted Items folder has been emptied, it may be possible to recover the deleted items without using the backup tape. You can configure Exchange 2000 so it does not immediately delete mail or mailboxes for a specified number of days. This period is known as the deleted item retention period, and you can tailor the duration to meet your organizations needs. If the missing item was deleted within the deleted item retention period, the user can recover the item without your assistance.

Most requests to restore user mailboxes or individual messages can be avoided if users are familiar with the Deleted Items folder and the deleted item retention period. To further discourage requests to recover items from the backup tape, you may want to charge for recovering files from tape.

To restore the users mailbox, you must restore the Information Store to a different Exchange server to avoid affecting other users on the production Exchange server.

If you must recover the data from tape, you can use the following procedure.

1. Configure your recovery server to match the configuration of the production Exchange server. The recovery server should reside on a network separate from the production servers. The recovery server, storage group , and databases must have the same names as their counterparts on the production server.

2. Restore the database to the recovery server using the procedures described in Section 9.10.

3. Log on as the mailbox owner or as an administrator with the appropriate permissions, and start Outlook.

4. Using Outlook, extract the message or mailbox contents to a PST file.

5. Give the PST to the user. If the user is unfamiliar with PST files, you may need to provide additional assistance.