2003 Exchange Restore

2003 Exchange Restore Consulting Services

One of the most important tasks for an Exchange administrator is the regular, day-by-day, backing up of all the Exchange databases. This can be easily accomplished by use of the built-in NTBACKUP.EXE software found on your Exchange 2003 server. If the server running Exchange 2003 is still functional after a disaster, recovering a store is a pretty straightforward process. Make note of the following guidelines when restoring Exchange stores:

Verify that the Exchange Information Store service is running.
Verify that the Exchange store or stores that you want to restore are dismounted.

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Make an Offline backup before restoring the store

Whatever may be the reason for the restore process, always try to make a copy of all existing database files, even if these files are damaged. That way, if the attempted recovery fails it may still be possible to repair the existing store from its copy even if the store has been damaged. When repairing the damaged store it is likely that you will lose at least some data, but even this might be a better deal than having to do with a total database loss. When restoring from a backup set, your current database files will overwritten as soon as the process begins. You should rename the old database files that you are restoring before you begin the restore process. If you do not leave your database drive at least half empty, you will not be able to restore from backup because you will not have enough space left for the restore.

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Restoring Mailboxes from the Recovery Databases by Using Exmerge.exe

Exchange Server 2003 provides quite a flexible and easy way to mount storage databases using the new Recovery Storage Group feature. After having started to restore the database from a tape you configure the Recovery Storage Group that can be created by right clicking the server object in Exchange System Manager and choosing to create a Recovery Database Storage Group. Within this group you can now mount your restored database and use the Exmerge utility to move the recovered mailbox data from the Recovery Storage Group to the regular storage group. Using this method, you can recover a whole database or just a single mailbox. Every mailbox that is connected to the Recovery Storage Group is disconnected and therefore not accessible to users with mail clients. Before you can run Exmerge.exe successfully you have to grant the appropriate user permission to be able to open the store. In general nobody is able to open storage than his own. Microsoft recommends creating a new security group for it, adding the logon account to this group and then granting this group permission on the database object in Exchange System Manager. Another “quick and dirty” way to grant permissions to the appropriate group is to put them into the security group “Exchange Domain Server”. This will grant the account the permission, too.

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