Exchange 2010 manual restore

About

This document shows how to restore and merge an Exchange 2010 single mailbox item manually.

Prerequisite

• Access to the Exchange 2010 System with administrator rights
• Enough free disk space to hold the complete restore of desired restore area

Restoring the data

Create a recovery area

In order to be able to restore the data a so-called recovery area has to be created. This is possible by starting the Exchange Management Shell and using the PowerShell cmdlet "New-MailboxDatabase":

This way of restoring single-mails may also be used if the default partition (C:) does not have enough free disk space to hold your storage group.

The following command creates a recovery area called RESTORE:

Explanation of the used parameters:

Restore the data to the recovery area

After the recovery area has been created, the restore can be initiated. Just start a regular Exchange single mailbox restore, but with a restore area as target, as shown here:

Choose an e-mail you want to recover and proceed with the last step

set the desired target RDB to the one created beforehand:

Merging E-Mails

Check if the restore area is on-line and mounted

Before being able to merge data, check if the restore area is on-line and mounted, if not, use eseutil on the restored EDB file to get more information, why the restored database is unable to be mounted.

Merge the complete mailbox

In order to merge the complete mailbox use the following command in the Exchange Management Shell:

Merge certain folders

In order to merge certain folders, use the following command, the folders are specified with the -IncludeFolders switch:

Merge certain e-mails by subject

Further documentation

For more command line examples see following TechNet article:

TechNet Documentation

Cleaning up

If the merge is successful is reported on the Exchange management shell. E-Mails should appear in the users' inbox immediately.

In order to remove the Restore Area unmount the Database:

and remove the restore area with:

Note: This command will remove the Database in Exchange, but will not remove the files on the Filesystem.

Troubleshooting

Restore fails with Error Code "0x80004005"

The Error:

means the restore area could not be mounted, because the restored database is not in an clean state.

Use the following command to check, why the database is in a dirty shutdown state:

and proceed with recovering the EDB File with the usual eseutil commands (soft recover/ hard recover). See also: Exchange Server Database Utility Guide