Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Restoring Exchange using Microsoft DPM 2007 SP1

This article will walk you step-by-step through performing a restore on Microsoft Exchange 2007 using Data Protection Manager 2007 SP1.

To recover Exchange data, you must first have an active recovery storage group mounted. To do this, open the Exchange Management Console (EMC), go to tools, and then click "Troubleshooting Assistant." You must first enter the server and user information and click next.


Next, you must select a task. Choose "Create a recovery storage group."


Now you must select the recovery storage group that contains the mailbox you want to recover. For this example, we will choose the executive storage group. Click next.

The next screen asks you to name the recovery storage group and verify the location of the exchange data and logs. When done, click "Create Recovery Storage Group."


The last screen will show you whether or not the creation was successful:


Next, recover the database to the recovery storage group. Log onto your DPM server, and go to the Recovery tab of the DPM 2007 console. Expand the Exchange server, and click on the storage group from which you want to restore the mailbox database:


Right-click on the database in the right-hand side of the screen and click "Recover…" Click Next on the review screen.

Select "Recover to Recovery Storage Group."


Specify the Exchange server, the Storage Group Name (Recovery Storage Group), and the database (Executive Database):


Select to mount the databases after they are recovered:


Click Next, review your recovery settings, and then click "Recover."

Now to recover a single mailbox, you will need to open the Exchange Management Shell on your exchange server. The following commands are examples of different mailbox recovery scenarios:

  • To recover a single mailbox from the RSG database to the active mailbox 'username', run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:

Restore-Mailbox -identity 'UserDisplayName' -RSGDatabase 'RSG\mailbox
database'

  • Use the following command to restore a mailbox in a Recovery Storage Group into a folder in the same active mailbox or a different active mailbox:

    Restore-Mailbox -RSGMailbox 'SourceUsername' -RSGDatabase 'RSG\Mailbox Database' -id 'DestinationMailbox' -TargetFolder 'FolderName'

  • To recover email in a particular date range into a folder in the same active mailbox or a different active mailbox, use this command:

Restore-Mailbox -RSGMailbox 'SourceUsername' -RSGDatabase 'RSG\mailbox database' -id 'DestinationUsername' -TargetFolder 'FolderName' -StartDate 'mm/dd/yy' -EndDate 'mm/dd/yy'

A note about "single mailbox restores" in DPM 2007: If you use DPM 2007 to restore a single mailbox, DPM still restores the entire mailbox database to your Exchange server, and you still have to use powershell to pull the mailbox data out of the database. Personally, I don't use this feature. It seems repetitive to me. But if you do use it, make sure you have enough space to restore the whole database.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Good posting. Thank You.

Heiko