Recovering Exchange mailboxes and mailbox items
This section describes how to recover Exchange mailboxes and mailbox items from database backups, from application-aware backups, and from mailbox backups. The mailboxes or mailbox items can be recovered to a live Exchange Server or to Microsoft Office 365.
The following items can be recovered:
- Mailboxes (except for archive mailboxes)
- Public folders
- Public folder items
- Email folders
- Email messages
- Calendar events
- Tasks
- Contacts
- Journal entries
- Notes
You can use search to locate the items.
Recovery to an Exchange Server
Granular recovery can be performed to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and later. The source backup may contain databases or mailboxes of any supported Exchange version.
Granular recovery can be performed by Agent for Exchange or Agent for VMware (Windows). The target Exchange Server and the machine running the agent must belong to the same Active Directory forest.
When a mailbox is recovered to an existing mailbox, the existing items with matching IDs are overwritten.
Recovery of mailbox items does not overwrite anything. Instead, the full path to a mailbox item is recreated in the target folder.
Requirements on user accounts
A mailbox being recovered from a backup must have an associated user account in Active Directory.
User mailboxes 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 that does not meet the above conditions is skipped during recovery.
If some mailboxes are skipped, the recovery will succeed with warnings. If all mailboxes are skipped, the recovery will fail.
Recovery to Office 365
Recovery can be performed from backups of Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 and later.
When a mailbox is recovered to an existing Office 365 mailbox, the existing items are kept intact, and the recovered items are placed next to them.
When recovering a single mailbox, you need to select the target Office 365 mailbox. When recovering several mailboxes within one recovery operation, the software will try to recover each mailbox to the mailbox of the user with the same name. If the user is not found, the mailbox is skipped. If some mailboxes are skipped, the recovery will succeed with warnings. If all mailboxes are skipped, the recovery will fail.
For more information about recovery to Office 365, refer to "Protecting Office 365 mailboxes".