Creating Recovery Points for Exchange Database Block-Level Backups

Applies to: Exchange 2010, Exchange 2013, Exchange 2016, DAG and stand-alone environments

Before you recover messages from an Exchange database block-level backup, you create recovery points from which you can recover individual messages.

Creating a recovery point initiates a job type called Create Recovery Point. After you create the job, you have the option to monitor the status of the job from a list of recovery points. The recovery point job has two has two states: In Progress and Ready.

• When the job state is In Progress, a dummy mount is created, and the corresponding logs are copied to a temporary location, and then replayed. The time that it takes to complete this phase depends on the number of transaction logs that need to be replayed.

• When the state is Ready, you can recover messages from a block-level backup.

Each recovery point has an expiration date. By default, the recovery point expires after one day (24 hours). If you keep a recovery point for an extended amount of time, make sure that you have enough hardware resources or disk space to maintain that recovery point.

Before You Begin

Make sure that you have performed all the tasks required to configure restores for block-level backups.

Procedure

1. From the CommCell Browser, expand Client Computers > client > Exchange Database.

2. Right-click subclient, and then click All Tasks > Browse and Restore.

   The Browse and Restore Options dialog box appears.

3. Click View Content.

4. In the left pane of the Client Browse window, select a database, and then click Recover Messages.

   The Configure Message Recovery dialog box appears.

5. From the Select a MediaAgent list, select the MediaAgent that is used to perform the recovery operation.

6. In the For block-level backups, expire after n days box, enter the number of days after which the recovery point expires.

   Tip

   You can change the expiration date from the Recovery Points dialog box after the recovery point is created and in a Ready state.

7. Click OK.

   A message appears that displays the job ID number.

8. Click OK to close the message.

What to Do Next

Open the Recovery Points dialog box, to do any of the following:

• View the job status of the active recovery points.

• Open the Browse window and recover messages.

• Change the expiration date of a recovery point.

• Delete a recovery point.