Backup and Restore an Individual Exchange 2010

mailbox

29/1/2015

Aditya Mediratta

Microsoft Exchange Server

Overview

Here I’ll demonstrate the step by step process for recovering individual mailbox items for an Exchange

Server 2010 mailbox using Windows Server Backup.

The mailbox user “Aditya” is being used for this tutorial, and he has sent following items to “neloy”.

Steps:

1.) BACKING UP THE EXCHANGE SERVER 2010 MAILBOX DATABASE

Here we add windows backup feature to server:

2.) to start with exchange server backup, we choose following from windows backup utility:

We select the volume containing exchange server 2010 installed files (in this case c:/ )

Once backup is successful, I’ll now delete all the emails from Aditya’s mailbox (including the one from deleted items)

2.) RESTORING AN EXCHANGE SERVER 2010 MAILBOX DATABASE TO AN ALTERNATE LOCATION

As of now we’ll restore the backup to alternate location and proceed with recovery process. To start we choose

following from windows backup utility:

3.) BRINGING THE RESTORED DATABASE TO A CLEAN SHUTDOWN STATE WITH ESEUTIL

The restored database file will be in a state known as “dirty shutdown”. You can confirm this by running the

following ESEUtil command, specifying the path to the restored .edb file on your server.

Next check the state of the log files with the following ESEUtil command, specifying the path to the restored log files.

Note the end of the path is the log file prefix, in this case “E00″

Now we can run ESEUtil in recovery mode to bring the database into a clean shutdown state.

However I found even after running above command our database is still in ‘dirty state’, now we’ll use eseutil /p to

clean the DB

This brings our database to clean state

4.) CREATING AN EXCHANGE SERVER 2010 RECOVERY DATABASE

The next stage of the recovery process is creating the Recovery Database. Launch the Exchange Management Shell.

Run the New-MailboxDatabase cmdlet with the following parameters:

-Recovery:$true (specifies that the database will be a Recovery Database)

-EdbFilePath (the path to the restored mailbox database file)

-LogFolderPath (the path to be used for transaction log files, which must be an empty folder)

-Server (the server that the recovery is being performed on)

In this example the following command is run.

Note the warning about the database not being in a clean shutdown state. Since we’ve already

brought the database to a clean shutdown state we can now mount the recovery database.

With the recovery database mounted we can now proceed with mailbox item restores. You can see the available

items to restore by looking at the mailbox statistics for the recovery database.

Again to verify, I’ll show you that mailbox of user “Aditya” is empty as emails have been deleted

To restore all mailbox items into a sub-folder of the existing mailbox so that they can be inspected use the following

command.

The restored items will now be visible in the mailbox.

Recovery successful ☺

Thank You -Aditya Mediratta