Restoring a mail box from tape backup

[Gareth1978]

It is possible to restore a users mailbox from tape backup. If so could someone point me in the right direction to finding the right bits to restore ? I tend to just leave exchange running and do the most essential maintainence so have never thought about having to do this before !

Thanks

**One day, I will find a question that no one else has answered........and will also know the answer to it ! **

 

[Trackhappy]

Hi Gareth.
You need to give us a little more to go on, like what sort of backups you run (Backup Exec, Arcserve, NTBackup?). Also the status of the account. (Have you removed the account? Have you removed the user account that was the owner?).
In short, as long as you have backups it is possible, but the amount of effort depends upon the answers to some of the above.

 

[Spirit]

Err, you mean you've got the BU and you want to do one or you want to plan to do one?

Yes it is possible. Depending on your set up depends how much of a nightmare it will be tho'.

If you run something like veritas exchange backup then it is sooooooooo easy to restore a single message I feel guilty about getting paid for it. However, if you don't a restore of mailbox/message will involve you building a new server, idnetical to you current exchange server (names etc.) off network restoring exchange to it, extract the item(s) as a PST then importing them into the Live server.

This is not fun! Any help?

Iain

 

[Gareth1978]

Using ArcserveIT for windows NT. The users account and mailbox are intact.

Thanks

**One day, I will find a question that no one else has answered........and will also know the answer to it ! **

 

[Gareth1978]

Basically the user believes that most of their emails have been deleted. To pacify them I was going to restore the mailbox from a backup - if it wasn't too much of a pain.

**One day, I will find a question that no one else has answered........and will also know the answer to it ! **

 

[Trackhappy]

Should be pretty basic to restore a mailbox from the restore page, assuming you are doing Mailbox backups with Arcserve. We use Backup Exec., so I can't tell you off the top of my head how to do it. Just select the restore option and if I recall it has an Exchange entry in there where you cna follow the tree down to the users mailbox. Arcserve has a "bricks level" backup also, which allows you to backup and restore discrete emails in a mailbox. If that is on you can go down the tree to select the emails you want.
Bear in mind that if you restore the mailbox complete, you will lose any entries since that backup.
Good luck.

 

[zbnet]

Trackhappy has pointed out that if you use a brick-level backup program, you can restore an individual mailbox. But if you aren't, you can't. Brick-leve backups are pretty inefficient compared to normal full online store backups, so there's a cost to their convenience.

If you only have a full online backup of the store, you need to restore the whole store to get at a single mailbox. That's the way it was designed.

 

[riverrockblues]

If you use Veritas Backup Exec, in order to be able to restore individual mailboxes, you would have had to include in you backup job the following three items of your Exchange server: Microsoft Exchange Directory, Microsoft Exchange Information Store, and Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes. You should not have backed-up any of the \exchsrvr folder on any drives, otherwise the is a slight possibility of database corruption. These folders should only be backed-up if you are performing a static database backup where all Exchange services are stopped. But this will not allow you to restore mailboxes individually.

Then to restore an individual mailbox, it is as simple as defining a Restore job and selecting the mailbox to restore by drilling down the file tree on the Backup server that is running Veritas to:

<backup server name> -> Remote Selections -> Microsoft Windows Network -> <domain name> -> <Exchange server name> -> Microsoft Exchange Directory. Also select Exchange Information Store and Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes.

Save your job definition and then run it.

This assumes that your Exchange server is a different server than your backup server.

 

[CaptainStorm]

If you use Veritas Backup Exec, in order to be able to restore individual mailboxes, you would have had to include in you backup job the following three items of your Exchange server: Microsoft Exchange Directory, Microsoft Exchange Information Store, and Microsoft Exchange Mailboxes

>>>> I have the first 2 in veritas but not the third showing up in my restore area. How do i get that third one to show up with the induvidual mail boxes. I have the exchange plugin... Did I miss something on configuration?

Storm

 

[dlstewart6759]

Arcserve can indeed restore mail back to a mailbox, provided you are doing Brick Level backups in Arcserve.

Simply select the mailbox and whichever folder you want to restore and restore back to the original location. You will need to supply your Exchange agent service account credentials. FYI - Arcserve cannot restore back individual messages, just folders.

If you need to recover a deleted mailbox, that's a bit more difficult. You will need to create a duplicate of the original mailbox, then send a message to it to initialize it. You can then restore back to this new mailbox.

If you have not done Brick level backups, then the only way to restore back is to do a restore of the whole database to another server and do an off line recovery.

 

[myauto]

hi dlstewart6759,I need to recover a deleted mailbox with arcserve,but every time I failed with the message EC=Backup Agent Error -- (354) "Failed to find the object information",I tried to recreated a mailbox with orignal user name,but I still failed with restore!
can you help me?
NT(SP6)+Exchange 5.5(SP3)+Arcserve 7.0 whit brick leve backup!

 

[kovacsa]

Hello ...We had the exact same problem and this is what works for us ...

Restart Services:

Backup Agent RPC Server
Client Agent for ArcServe

All went smooth after this.

Good Luck

Kovacs