I've never attempted to restore a deleted individual mailbox and figure it's a good thing to have tried for when/if it's actually needed. I have a full backup from Monday (today is Wednesday), i have the GRT options checked in the backup for Exchange, I can browse through the backup job and find a particular employee's mailbox that I removed on Tuesday. My question is, is it as simple as selecting that checkbox and submitting the job? His account no longer exists on the network because he is no longer employed with us, i figured it was a good person to try this on. I see an option in Backup Exec that says "automatically recreate user accounts and mailboxes", so i assume i would select that as well. I guess it just seems too easy, and since this is a production server i wanted to ask around before attempting to restore this individual mailbox back. Anyone have any experience with this? Thanks.
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I know it's not best practice here to answer with links, so I hope comments fly: "When redirecting the restore of individual Mailbox or Public Folder items to an alternate location the mailbox or public folder must already exist." http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH83299 Since you can redirect, create a new mail store (out of production), link the user's mailbox there, then target that for the destination of the restore. – mbrownnyc Sep 07 '11 at 16:22
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Ahh, so I can't actually restore the mailbox back to our production information store, but i'd need to create an entire new store for that mailbox? I don't necessarily need to redirect it unless it just needs to be setup that way, since i'd like it back where it was before deletion and there is currently no account there by that name, is that the only way? Just curious and making sure i totally understand it before pulling the trigger. :) – Don Sep 07 '11 at 16:37
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I suspect you can restore it into a store that happens to be in production, and that you do need to have the mailbox/user in place before the restore occurs. Create the user, create the mailbox (or allow backup exec to do this for you), then perform the restore, to the original store or any other (where the mailbox exists). Do you understand? An active directory user object and a mailbox are linked via properties of the user object. The mailbox is an entity that exists in the scope of the mailbox store. – mbrownnyc Sep 07 '11 at 17:17
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... mailbox stores are ESE *databases*. These databases store mailboxes, and their items... the GRT backs up the items. So... all that other stuff needs to be present so that Backup Exec has a place to put the objects it has (you know... the mail items). So, yes, create the user, mailbox, then restore items to it :) Hope this helps. – mbrownnyc Sep 07 '11 at 17:24
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Ok, i'll give it a shot! One other thing i notice, when i go into BackupExec, restore, Microsoft Exchange, i see there at the bottom it has a checkbox beside "Mount database after restore". I'm assuming it's ok to leave it all as is, and it won't bother the information store while everyone is using it right now...as in i expect it won't just dismount/remount when it does this, i hope it's not noticable for the other end users...? Thanks! – Don Sep 07 '11 at 18:06
1 Answers
Yes, that's all you need to do. If you're restoring the mailbox for a user account that's been deleted and you want to restore the mailbox and the user account then you need the option to automatically recreate user accounts and mailboxes selected. You do not need to restore the mailbox to an intermediate mailbox store or mailbox.
As for the option to mount the database after restore, this is only valid for a restore of the Information Store itself and has no bearing on the restore of an individual mailbox, mailbox item, public folder, or public folder item.
You can choose to redirect the restore of the mailbox to an alternate user/mailbox but the alternate user/mailbox must already exist and you must unselect the option to automatically recreate user accounts and mailboxes. The restore will effectively overwrite the destination mailbox so only do this with an empty destination mailbox for the purpose of exporting the contents of the mailbox (for when you don't want to recreate the user account and only want to retrieve the contents of the mailbox).
Take note that like any user account restore, the user account group membership is not restored and must be edited manually after the restore is complete.
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