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After extensive Exchange 2003 DB corruption, we have set a dial-tone as emergency means of service for our users, then began restoring latest back-up to a recovery group, in parallel with fixing the corrupted database with eseutil.

As the fix going to surprisingly take less time, and also be more complete than the backup, we thinking of using the fixed database instead of recovery group for dial-tone.

So the question is what correct way to do this? Can we just swap and move the dial-tone to recovery group, and move the fixed database back to our production store, then merge from dial-tone to production?

Or there are other issues we should take into account?

HopelessN00b
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SyRenity
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  • possible duplicate of [Restoring from BackUp Exec to 2003 Recovery Storage Group](http://serverfault.com/questions/229126/restoring-from-backup-exec-to-2003-recovery-storage-group) – Jim B Jan 31 '11 at 17:20
  • Actually these are two different issues - we doing the restore in parallel. – SyRenity Jan 31 '11 at 17:36

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Using a repaired Exchange database (that is, a database that's had an ESEUTIL-based repair run on it) in production is discouraged by Microsoft in my experience. The repaired database may work, but you're not guaranteed that it won't have problems down the road.

I'd ExMerge out the contents of the repaired database and import it into the new "dialtone" database you created. You lose SIS when you do that, but you gain a measure of confidence that you're not just kicking database issues down the road to create future problems.

Evan Anderson
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  • What about the recovery functionality in Exchange 2003, would it do the trick here? – SyRenity Jan 31 '11 at 17:25
  • I don't know what you mean when you say "he recovery functionality in Exchange 2003". What I'm saying (I'll edit for clarity) is: If you've run ESEUTIL on the database to repair it you're better off getting the data out of the repaired database and imported into a new, not-repaired database. – Evan Anderson Jan 31 '11 at 17:26
  • I meant the Recover Mailbox Data feature in 2003 SP2, instead of the ExMerge util: technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996155(EXCHG.65).aspx. As for you advice, it's very clear :), and thanks for sharing these important heads-up. – SyRenity Jan 31 '11 at 18:09
  • By the way, how SIS will influence the disk space? Will it kick in and start working once I recover items to new production (the dial-tone) DB? Thanks. – SyRenity Jan 31 '11 at 18:09