Recovering mailboxes, public folders, and their contents to the Exchange server

Requirements on user accounts

A mailbox or public folder being recovered from a backup must have an associated user account in Active Directory.

User mailboxes, public folders, and their contents can be recovered only if their associated user accounts are enabled. Shared, room, and equipment mailboxes can be recovered only if their associated user accounts are disabled.

A mailbox or public folder that does not meet the above conditions is skipped during recovery. Also, discovery and arbitration mailboxes are skipped.

If some mailboxes are skipped, the recovery task will succeed with warnings. If all mailboxes are skipped, the recovery task will fail.

Requirements on mailbox existence

If the mailboxes being recovered already exist on the current Exchange server, the recovery will proceed exactly to these mailboxes.

The mailboxes that are missing on the current Exchange server, but exist on a different Exchange server within the current Exchange organization, will be skipped during recovery. To recover such mailboxes, you should connect the console to the Exchange server hosting these mailboxes and start the mailbox recovery on this server.

If the mailboxes are missing within the current Exchange organization, you should specify the mailbox database where these mailboxes will be created (see later in this section).

Mailbox recovery settings

To set up the mailbox recovery, specify the appropriate settings as follows.

Overwriting

Choose what Acronis Backup should do if it finds that the target mailbox has items (e-mails, calendar events, contacts, tasks, etc.) with the same ID as those in the backup:

• Overwrite existing items - this is the default setting that fits most situations.

  Note: If you recover the same items more than once, each subsequent recovery duplicates the items because original item IDs will change after the overwriting.

• Do not overwrite existing items - this setting will let you retain the changes made to the items after the backup had been created.

Database to re-create any missing mailboxes

If the mailboxes being recovered are missing within the current Exchange organization, specify the mailbox database (in the current Exchange server) where the new mailboxes will be created. The newly created mailboxes will be properly initialized and recovery will be performed to these mailboxes. Mailboxes will also be re-created when recovering mailbox contents.

Automatic mailbox re-creation is not supported in Exchange 2003 and for linked mailboxes. The available solutions are as follows:

• [For Exchange 2003] Manually re-create the missing mailboxes and connect to these mailboxes using Outlook. After that, perform the recovery.
• [For linked mailboxes] Recover these mailboxes to their original mailbox database if they still exist there. Otherwise, recover them to .pst files.