In one of our previous articles, we
have discussed about the procedure to RESTORE EXCHANGE MAILBOXES IN EXCHANGE
2010” and in this article, we will take a look at a scenario where we need to
restore Exchange 2013 database with
the help of windows server backup.
Scenario.
As you can see in the screenshot
below, Paul Cunningham (a user of this mailbox) has received mails till 8:07pm.
The last backup copy of the
server was made till 8 am
The last backup was taken at 8am (see
in the above image), so the items are present in the Paul’s mailbox that have
been accepted since the last backup. Are
those mailbox items at risk of being lost in case of a failure or
corruption? Let’s see what may happen
next.
Let us assume that the database
has been lost or deleted. To pretend this, we have dismounted the database DB01
and deleted the EDB file.
As the EDB file is lost and in
order to get the mailbox data back, it is required to restore the data from the
last backup taken.
As we are utilizing Windows
Server Backup to recover the exchange 2013 data so, it is not possible to
restore any particular edb file, and in case any other databases are also
present in the backup, they will be restored too.
You can see that two databases
DB01 & DB02 have been hosted by the server and only database DB01 has been
lost and requires recovering whereas DB02 is absolutely fine.
Now let us see how we can use
Windows Server Backup to recover lost edb file:
1. Go to Windows Server Backup, open the ‘Recovery’ wizard.
As you can see below, the backup
is stored in “this server”
2. Now, select the date of the backup which you wish to use for the
recovery purpose. After selecting the date, a dialog box will be prompted
containing multiple options for recovery type.
3. Select ‘Applications’ from the multiple options
4. Select the ‘Exchange’ Application
and leave “Do not perform a roll forward recovery of the application databases”
unticked as we want to perform a roll forward recovery in this case.
5. Now, a dialog box will appear in
which you need to set the location where you want to save the recovered
application. By default, “Recover to original location” will be selected and
leave it selected only and proceed further.
As a final point, click “Recover”
button to initiate the restore process.
Note that during the restore process, all the exchange mailboxes will be
down even if they are in healthy state, thus Exchange Server will face a
downtime till the restoration process gets completed. So, in this case DB02 will
also go in offline mode during the restoration process of DB01.
After the process gets
accomplished, both DB01 and DB02 users can access all of their mailbox items.
As you can notice from the above
process, that Exchange Server faces a downtime during the restoration process
of even a single databases, and other users won’t be able to access their
mailbox items during the server downtime which causes them inconvenience. And,
what will you do in case you don’t have backup of your mailboxes? So, to avoid
these situations, one of the best alternatives is to make use of any
professional Exchange Recovery Software. These software can work on any
specific edb file and does not affects other healthy exchange databases. One
such professional software is Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange RecoverySoftware