Backing Up and Restoring Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Part 2

Executive Summary:

In Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, you'll need to use a Recovery Storage Group (RSG) to recover data older than the current retention period. You can create the RSG and perform a recovery both from Exchange Management Console and by using Windows PowerShell commands through Exchange Management Shell. Exchange Server 2007 features dial tone portability, which lets you move mailboxes without transferring their data; this feature let you move users off a failed server to reestablish mail flow and lets you recover and merge their data later.

The key to any backup and recovery situation is knowing what to do by planning ahead. As I showed in "Backing Up and Restoring Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Part 1" (http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/97383/97383.html), you can use NTBackup to create a full backup of your Exchange organization, and you can use simple Windows PowerShell commands through Exchange Management Shell to restore a mailbox database and individual mailboxes or mail items if the deleted items retention period hasn't expired. Having covered the simplest methods of recovery in the previous article, I'll now show you how to recover a single mailbox or mail item when the retention period has expired, and then move on to the problem of getting users reconnected after a server failure. . . .