Exchange 2003 Single E-mail/Mailbox Restore:
From an image-level backup
Written By: Ricky El-Qasem
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Contents
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ... 3
ASSUMPTIONS... 3
EXCHANGE 2003 RECOVERY STORAGE GROUP... 4
How a Recovery Storage Group Is Different from a Regular Storage Group ... 4
Creating a Exchange Recovery Storage Group ... 5
DATABASE EXTRACTION ... 8
TESTING ... 14
DATABASE CONSISTENCY... 14
TEMPORARY RECOVERY STORAGE GROUP ... 15
RESTORING THE DATABASE FROM BACKUP ... 19
EXMERGE ... 21
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As more organisations move to virtualisation to facilitate core infrastructure, they look to the eco-system vendors to provide necessary core services, such as backup. Who better to help them meet those requirements than the virtualisation vendors themselves?
VMware enhanced the ability to take offline snapshots for the backup of virtual machines with the advent of VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup). VCB is a framework that allows third-party vendors to make use of API calls to produce LAN-free consistent snapshots of virtual machines. This is achieved by providing a block list to the VCB framework allowing for access of the virtual machine’s disk subsystem. The block list is presented across a Storage Area Network (SAN)/ Network Attached Storage (NAS), Fibre channel, ISCSI or NAS, allowing backup I/O to occur away from the production LAN orientated traffic. The result of these API calls is an agentless live image-level copy of the virtual disks, or an agentless file-level mount of the virtual disks. What VCB doesn’t do, however, is produce a brick-level backup of your Active Directory, SQL Server or Exchange Server. Brick-level refers to the ability of the administrator to choose the smallest component of the backup to restore. In the case of Exchange Server, that smallest unit is a single e-mail within a mailbox within a mail store. Without this capability, at the point of restore, instead of using what is available from a VCB snapshot, the administrator would have to restore the whole server. The way around this traditionally would have been to use an agent-style backup tool which has the ability to back up at the smallest component, in this case a single e-mail. This is an imperfect solution, however, as it could be frustrating for administrators managing two environments; virtualisation and Exchange, as it means purchasing two different backup solutions.
But all is not lost; Microsoft has established a best practice on how to retrieve a single e-mail or mailbox from an Exchange 2003 mailbox store without agent technology. This document outlines how this is achieved in a virtual environment, and even though the backup product used in this example is Veeam Backup, this document could apply to any VCB image-level snapshot of an Exchange mailbox store.
ASSUMPTIONS
To find this information useful it is assumed you meet the following prerequisites: You are conversant with Exchange 2003 and the eseutil command
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EXCHANGE 2003 RECOVERY STORAGE GROUP
A Recovery Storage Group can be mounted as a second copy of an Exchange mailbox store
(database) on the same computer as the original mailbox store, or on any other Exchange computer that is in the same administrative group. You can then use the Recovery Storage Group feature to recover e-mail/mailbox data without having to install and to configure a separate Exchange recovery computer.
The concept we will employ in this solution is to extract the backed-up mailbox store as a flat file, filename.edb, and present it to Exchange as a Recovery Storage Group database.
Using Veeam Backup we can instantly extract this file from a full image-level backup without decompressing the image of the snapshot.
How a Recovery Storage Group Is Different from a Regular Storage Group
A Recovery Storage Group is a specialized storage group that can exist with regular storage groups. Although a Recovery Storage Group is similar to a regular storage group, Recovery Storage Groups differ from regular storage groups in the following ways: All protocols except MAPI are disabled. This means that you cannot send mail to or receive mail from a mailbox store that is in a Recovery Storage Group. However, you can use the Exmerge.exe tool to access mailboxes to recover data.
You cannot connect user mailboxes in a Recovery Storage Group to user accounts in Active Directory. The only supported method that you can use to access mailboxes in a Recovery Storage Group is by using the Exchange Server 2003 version of the
Exmerge.exe tool.
You cannot apply system and mailbox management policies to a Recovery Storage Group.
Online maintenance and defragmentation do not run against databases in the Recovery Storage Group.
You must manually mount databases in the Recovery Storage Group. You cannot configure the databases to automatically mount in Exchange System Manager. You cannot change path locations or move data files after a Recovery Storage Group is
created because those actions are not supported. If you want to change the location of the files in a Recovery Storage Group, you have to delete and then re-create the Recovery Storage Group.
5 | P a g e You can restore any private mailbox store from any computer that is running Exchange
Server 2003 or Exchange 2000 Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later to a Recovery Storage Group, if the computer that contains the private mailbox store and the computer that contains the Recovery Storage Group are both located in the same administrative group.
Note: When you restore a mailbox store to the Recovery Storage Group, the mailbox
store is upgraded to the version of the mailbox store that is currently running on the computer. This means that you must upgrade the original computer to the version of Exchange that is running on the computer where the Recovery Storage Group is located before you can copy the databases back to the original computer. For example, if you restore a mailbox store from a computer that is running Exchange 2000 Server SP3 to a Recovery Storage Group that is stored on a computer that is running Exchange Server 2003, you must upgrade the original computer to Exchange Server 2003.
You can use the Exmerge.exe tool to move or to copy mailbox data between servers regardless of the version of Exchange Server that is running on the computers.
By default, data is restored to the existing Recovery Storage Group on the computer. If you restore multiple databases to a Recovery Storage Group, all databases that you
add to the Recovery Storage Group must be from the same storage group. You can only have one Recovery Storage Group on a computer.
You can only have one Recovery Storage Group per two-node cluster, regardless of the number of Exchange virtual servers that are present. For clusters that contain more than two nodes, each Exchange virtual server can have its own Recovery Storage Group. Recovery Storage groups cannot be used to restore Exchange backups that were
performed using third-party software that supports the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) in Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Recovery Storage Groups can only be used to restore backups performed by an Exchange-aware backup application. Backup snapshots that were taken by using VSS can be restored only by using VSS.
Creating an Exchange Recovery Storage Group
In this section we describe the process of creating a Recovery Storage Group. An assumption is made here: Exchange 2003 Standard only allows you to make use of two mailbox stores:
1. Is the standard mailbox store
6 | P a g e If the administrator has expanded the use of the second database to facilitate a standard mailbox store, a Recovery Storage Group will no longer be available for use. This is not a problem with Exchange 2003 Enterprise.
Step 1: On the Exchange Server open the Exchange System Manager.
7 | P a g e Step3: Choose a folder location for the Recovery Storage Group.
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DATABASE EXTRACTION
In this section, we walk you through how to retrieve the database file required to create the Recovery Storage Group from a backup of a mailbox store.
If Veeam Backup is your preference (although this idea could apply with other technologies) walk through the restore wizard to extract files from a backup.
9 | P a g e Step 2: Select “Restore individual files from a backup file”
10 | P a g e Step 4: Select a point in time restore point.
11 | P a g e Step 5: Right-click said files and select “copy to”
Step 6: Copy the files to a folder or a network share which is accessible from the Exchange server later on.
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TESTING
To test this process, the easiest thing to do is delete and restore a known e-mail.
DATABASE CONSISTENCY
Depending on how you backed up your exchange server there’s a chance that the database is in a non-consistent state. Microsoft provides a tool to help stabilize the database before recovery. The first thing that you may have to do is perform a soft recovery using the > eseutil /r r00 /i
/d"c:\Program Files\Exchsrvr\Recovery Storage Group” command. This needs to be executed from the Exchange bin folder and pointed at your Recovery Storage Group folder.
15 | P a g e Now check the consistency of the database using the > eseutil/mh command.
And finally defrag the database using the >eseutil /d option.
TEMPORARY RECOVERY STORAGE GROUP
Before we can start using the database from the backup we have to initialize a temporary that we can write over later.
16 | P a g e Step 2: Right-click on the mailbox store server and choose “Select” from the drop-down menu.
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RESTORING THE DATABASE FROM BACKUP
The next task in this solution is to restore the original database extracted from the backup over the top of this newly created temporary recovery storage group. But before we do that, we need to ensure that it’s possible to write over said database with the backup. To ensure this, in the properties of the Recovery Storage Group make sure the appropriate check box is selected, then Click “OK.”
20 | P a g e Then rename the recovered (from backup) mailbox store files with the same name as the just-deleted files Recovery.edb and Recovery.stm.
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EXMERGE
Microsoft also provide a tool known as EXMERGE to perform tasks like importing and exporting of mailbox items to and throw from within a mailbox store. We’ll use EXMERGE to move an item from the Recovery Storage Group into the live mailbox store.
22 | P a g e You need to copy the “EXCHMEM.DLL” file from the Exchange bin folder into your EXMERGE folder.
23 | P a g e Select option 1, which performs the recovery task in one pass, making sure you select the option to delete the PST file after completion.
24 | P a g e If you need to restore a single e-mail you have the option to filter all other e-mails by specifying a string from the subject of the e-mail. Otherwise click OK if you want to restore the whole mailbox. In this example we have filtered for a subject with the string “test3,” as this is the e-mail we deleted earlier.
25 | P a g e Next select the mailbox required.
26 | P a g e Next specify a temporary holding area to extract the mailbox, usually the EXMERGE folder.
27 | P a g e And that’s it, job done, hopefully.
At this point we should have a restored a single e-mail. We could have tested this solution further by deleting two e-mails but only restoring one, which also works.
For further details on the Exchange Recovery Storage Group, please refer to the following links: MS knowledge base article 824126 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824126
MS document “Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Recovery Storage Groups”
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