Recovering a single Exchange 2007 mailbox using DPM 2007

In this post, I explain how you can use System Center Data Protection Manager 2007 (hereafter DPM) to recover a single Exchange Server 2007 mailbox to a Recovery Storage Group (hereafter RSG) and ‘merge’ the restore with the actual mailbox.

On our production environment, we have Exchange Server 2007 SP1 SCC running on a Windows Server 2008 failover cluster.

Before continuing, make sure you have created a Recovery Storage Group on your Exchange 2007 mailbox server for the mailbox database that you want to restore to. This can be done via GUI (Toolbox > Database Recovery Management) or via Powershell.

new-storagegroup -Server <Server_Name> -LogFolderPath path_to_Logfiles> -Name <RSG_Name> -SystemFolderPath <Database_Path> -Recovery

On the DPM server, click on the Recovery tab, and navigate through the hierarchy and locate the storage group that contains the mailbox that you want to recover. Double clicking on the mailbox database, shows a list of mailboxes. Right click on the mailbox  you want to restore and click Recover. You can also select a date and time of the recovery point from which you would like to restore.

In the Recovery Wizard, review the recovery information click Next and select the recovery type. Click browse to select your mailbox server. You will have to manually type the Storage Group Name (specify your Recovery Storage Group name here) and your Database Name (the mailbox database name inside your RSG).

Click Next, review the options and begin the restoration process.

Once the recovery process is complete, go back to the Exchange 2007 mailbox server. Open Exchange Management Console –> Toolbox –> Database Recovery Management.

Mount the Mailbox database that you just restored in the Recovery Storage Group. This shouldn’t require more explanation.

After mounting the database, come back to the above menu and select Merge or copy mailbox contents.

Select the mailbox database that contains the mailbox you want to recover and click Gather Merge information. On the next screen, review the merge options and click Perform pre-merge tasks.

Select your mailbox and click Perform Merge actions. Once the process completes, review the result.

The restored mailbox on the RSG database is now merged with the production database.

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