Restoring Exchange Databases

As part of your overall data protection planning, plan your Exchange database restore operations according to your requirements.

For more information about planning your restore operations, see Restore Backup Data.

Restore Objectives

Your objective for restoring data determine the process you must follow and the restore destination.

Disaster recovery

Plan your full system recovery in advance.

Recover data from long-term storage

If you back up your data to tape for long-term storage based on compliance requirements, you must identify the corresponding media and make sure that it is available for the recovery operation.

Restore data from a specified range of time

If you need to restore data during a range of time (for example, data that was deleted accidentally), you can browse and restore data based on a time range that you specify. Typically, this data would be restored to an out-of-place destination.

Restore to a point in time

If your Exchange database becomes corrupted or otherwise invalid, you can restore the database to a point in time before the database became unusable. Typically, this data would be restored to an in-place destination.

Recovering messages from an Exchange database (Live Browse)

You can recover individual messages using either of the two following methods:

• From an offline Exchange database.

• From an Exchange database without restoring the entire database.

Restore Destinations

The destination where you restore your data is determined by your restore objective. Generally, you perform and in-place or an out-of-place restore.

In-place restore

When you restore a database in place, you restore it to the same path on the same client from which the database was backed up.

Out-of-place restore

When you restore a database out of place, you can restore it to any one of the following destinations:

• A different client from which the database was backed up

• A different path on the same client from which the database was backed up

• A different database

You can perform in-place and out-of-place restores from the command line interface.

Transaction Logs

Choose whether to play the transaction logs during the restore. You can perform either one of the following operations:

• Restore to a file system with recovery

  If the restored Exchange database is in an inconsistent state, you need to restore the transaction logs, too. Replaying the transaction logs synchronizes them with the Exchange database, brings the Exchange database up to date, and routes any outstanding messages.

• Restore to a file system without recovery

  If you restore the Exchange database for offline data mining, you do not need to restore the transaction logs.

Transaction log files are stored temporarily in the Job Results directory during a restore. Before you restore the transaction log files, make sure that the Job Results directory has enough free space to store all the files. Otherwise, the restore will fail.