Exchange Offline Mining Tool

The Exchange Offline Mining Tool provides you with granular message recovery. You can mine data to restore mail messages, attachments, and other mailbox entities from an offline copy of an Exchange database. This includes standard mailbox databases and Public Folder databases.

To mine offline data, you must:

1. Identify the database where the mailbox is backed up.

2. Browse and restore the database to an out-of-place location.

3. Open the Exchange Offline Mining Tool and register the database (that is, associate the database with the tool).

The following provides a high-level example of mining data in either a standard environment or a snap environment.

Before You Begin

• Verify that your system meets the system requirements.

• Log on to the computer where the Exchange Offline Mining Tool is installed.

• If you need to mine all the mailboxes, make sure that your account is a member of the security group called exchangedbmineadmins. Create this security group if it does not already exist.

Mining the Data

1. Restore the data.

   • If you use a standard environment, browse to and restore the data that you want to mine to an out-of-place location without recovery.

   • If you use a snap environment, mount the snapshot using the server where the Exchange Offline Mining Tool is located as the destination path.

     Important

     Make sure that you select Protect Snapshot during mount.

2. In the Exchange Offline Mining Tool, navigate to the location where you restored the database's .edb file and associate the database with the tool.

   This is also called registering the database.

   • Standard environment.

   • Snap environment.

3. Navigate to the mount path for the transaction log files in the folder _restoredLogs.

4. Restore the messages at a high level or a granular level. For example, if you want to restore messages to a .pst file:

   • To restore a mailbox, select the mailbox in the left pane of the Exchange Offline Mining Tool, and then restore it as a .pst file.

   • To restore a folder, select the folder in the left pane of the Exchange Offline Mining Tool, and then restore it as a .pst file.

   • To restore messages, select as many messages as you want in the right pane of the Exchange Offline Mining Tool, and then restore them as a .pst file.