Exchange 5.5 Disaster Recovery

[Invincible]

I am currently recovering my exchange 5.5 server as a test to try out an Enterprise upgrade.

However, after the recovery there is no mappings between the Exchange mail account and the Primary windows NT account.
All our servers are linked under one site - not separate sites.

Has anyone seen this before, or know of any utility that can put them back without going through each one manually.


Thanks in advance

 

[JWilliams]

It's been a while, but IIRC, I ran the DS/IS consistency adjuster.

Get a copy of the Disaster Recovery White Paper. Everything you need to know is in there.

http://www.microsoft.com/Exchange/techinfo/administration/55/backuprestore.asp

Jessica

 

[fuego007]

You need to use a backup program that is Exchange-aware as part of your disaster recovery plan. The version of NT Backup that is installed with Exchange works well, although scheduling must be done using the AT command. It also requires more user intervention.

The DS/IS consistency adjuster will create mailboxes based on identified recipients in the IS, but cannot associate the mailboxes with NT accounts.

For you own piece of mind, I would invest in a backup product such as ArcServe or BackupExec. Whatever you choose, ensure you get the associated Exchange module.

 

[30362]

One other thing to keep in mind for disaster recovery is that you should not rely on a brick-level backup of your mailserver alone, you should always do an IS backup as well. Plus you should turn off circular logging so that you will always have a point-in-time backup if the server were to crash 5 or 6 hours after the last good backup - just be sure to use an Exchange aware backup product to backup the store when circular logging is turned off or you could fill up your harddrive very quickly.

 

[Invincible]

I think I am being misunderstood.

I have appropriate backups for our live Exchange server environment.

I am setting up a test environment, to upgrade from 5.5 to Enterprise Edition to remove the 16GB limit. Obviously, I do not want to test the upgrade on the live system!

I have copied the relevant directories - DSA / MDB etc and complete the recovery.

All the mailboxes appear - however, when I double click a mailbox, the Primary NT account field is blank !!

I could go through manually re-assigning NT accounts to mailboxes, but I see no reason why this should happen.


Thanks again for any pointers !