Exchange: Recovery Storage Group

As you might, or not, be aware off there is no item level based recovery in Exchange that is natively supported by Microsoft. So to perform recoveries we need the recovery storage group (captain obvious). The purpose of this is to mount the database you want to recover from on the Exchange server and use exmerge to merge the data you are recovering into the active database. An RSG will not be accessible to users and you can only create one at a time.

Exchange 2003:

1. Open Exchange system manager
2. Drill down to the server you want to recover to
3. Right click the server and select New > Recovery storage group
4. Specify the drive you have restored the database to. If possible use the same drive as the active database as this will improve performance quite a bit.
5. Click ok J
6. Right click the RSG and select “Add database to recover”
7. Select the right database you are going to recover.
8. Make sure that “This database can be overwritten by a restore” is checked (by default is should be)
9. Mount the database
10. Select the database in the recovery storage group, open the mailboxes container .
11. Select and right click the user(s) you want to restore.
12. Run Exchange task from the menu
13. Select the “recover mailbox data” task
14. Depending on your situation select either the Merge data or Copy data context
15. Schedule if necessary
16. Watch as your data is getting recovered.

Once this process is complete all data will be where it is supposed to be once more!

Exchange 2007:

1. Open up the Exchange management console
2. Go to the tools subset and open the Database Recovery Management tool
3. Select the storage group you want to link to the RSG
4. Double check the information presented in the next screen and click the Create the recovery storage group.
5. By default the RSG will be linked to the following folder: C:\program files\microsoft\exchange server\mailbox\<storage group>\RSGxxxxxxxxxx
6. Recover files to the RSG folder
7. Once recovered g o to the recovery storage group management tool and slect to mount the database.
8. Once mounted, go back to the task center and select Merge or copy mailbox contents
9. Make sure the proper database is selected and click on the gather merge information.
10. If you are dealing with a dial tone database click the “Swap database configurations” checkmark. If not, just click next
11. Click the Perform Pre-merge task
12. Select the mailboxes you wish to recover and let ExTRA do its thing.
13. Once the process is completed use ExTRA to dismount and remove the recovery storage group. Once that has been done you manually can remove the files in the RSGxxxxxxxx folder.

And that is it!

Exchange 2010:

1. Open the exchange management shell

2. Type in the following:

a. New-mailboxdatabase “name” –server “servername” –recovery:$true –edbfilepath “path to restored edb file”

b. Mount-database “name of DB you just created”

c. Get-mailboxstatistics –database “name of restored database”

d. New-mailboxrestorerequest –sourcedatabase “name of recovery database” –sourcestoremailbox “Username” –targetmailbox “emailaddress of target mailbox”

That will create a new recovery request. You can view the state of the request by using:

Get- MailboxRestoreRequest

Once completed, remove the request with

Get- MailboxRestoreRequest –status completed | remove-MailboxRestoreRequest

And that is it!