Exchange Backup and Restore – Public Folder backups and restores
| 17 March 2010
This article is an offshoot from an article I wrote about backup and restore situations faced by Exchange administrators. Due to lack of space, in the main article, I decided to add certain additional pieces of information about slightly different backup and restore scenarios to the site here and link to them from the original document. To read the main article go here: http://www.mmmug.co.uk/articles
This is the second addition to the main article and is all about how to perform backup and restore for Public Folders. It will folder a similar theme to the main article and will address the issues below:
· Public folder message lost
· Public folder lost
Public folder message lost
You get a call from a user;
“I’ve just realised that I have accidentally deleted a message from a public folder a few days ago which I need back. Can you help?”
At this point you make a couple of quick checks before asking the user an important question. The checks you make are as follows;
1. Ask the user which public folder the item was in.
2. Open ESM and navigate to the “Folders” section
3. Drill down through the folder structure until you locate the correct folder.
4. Select the folder and in the right hand pane, click the “Status Tab”
5. Looking in the “Public Folder Store” column will tell you where the public folder is stored.
6. Next, locate the relevant public folder store under the server object.
7. Right click the store and select “Properties”
8. On the “Limits” tab check in the “Deletion settings” area for the number of days that deleted items are retained for.
Having gathered the above information you must now ask the user how long ago they deleted the item. If it was less time that the deleted items retention period then you are in luck and should direct the user as follows;
1. In Outlook highlight the relevant public folder
2. Select the tools menu and click “Recover Deleted Items”
3. In the windows that opens locate the relevant mail and highlight it
4. To restore the mail to the deleted items folder click the “Recover Selected Items” button, second in from the left.
5. At this point the item will be back in the folder where it came from.
So what should you do if the item was deleted longer ago than the deleted items retention period? Well then you move onto the next scenario; Public Folder Lost.
Public Folder Lost
There are a couple of takes on this scenario. Firstly, if a Public Folder is accidentally deleted in much the same way as the item in the scenario above or by an admin, then it may be possible to restore the item using the deleted items retention feature (the dumpster). You should open Outlook as a user who was the owner of the folder. Then proceed as follows;
1. In Outlook highlight the parent of the deleted public folder
2. Select the tools menu and click “Recover Deleted Items”
3. In the windows that opens locate the relevant folder and highlight it
4. To restore the folder and the contents back into the tree click the “Recover Selected Items” button, second in from the left.
5. At this point the item will be back in the folder where it came from.
6. The only difference is that the item will be labelled (recovered). Simply rename the folder to remove this tag.
The second take on the public folder lost scenario is as follows. If a public folder is accidentally deleted but the deleted mailbox recovery period has expired or was never on in the first place, then it really has been deleted! This also follows on from our first scenario where a single item needs restoring but is not in the deleted items recovery location, the dumpster. In this scenario the only option it to restore from backup. However, there is one key problem here. As you will know from the main article, if you are restoring a single item from a mailbox or a single mailbox, then you can make use of the Recovery Storage Group to restore the backup into and extract the items or merge them back into the user’s mailbox. However, with Public Folder Stores, this is not possible. So restoring a single item or folder from a Public Folder Store is rather more complex. In fact the only accepted method with native tools is to build a recovery server (duplicating your live environment and AD) and restore to that. Then you can export the info from Outlook into a PST file and bring it across to the live environment. Not a simple option at all! So, as you can see, Public folder single item restore is one of the areas in which the native tools simply don’t work well enough! So what can you do? Simply put, you must look to third party tools. Any backup software that can perform “brick” level backups would help; however, personally, I have found that a tool from Ontrack called PowerControls gives excellent results. It doesn’t perform backups but it allows you to recover single items from your existing full store backups by opening the EBD file extracting the relevant information. More information can be found here: http://www.ontrack.com/powercontrols/ to the scenario of restoring a public folder store which you would still need if you had lost the entire store or if it had become corrupt. The steps below show how to recover the full public folder store (in fact it is very similar to the way you recover any Exchange DB:
Backto the scenario of restoring a public folder store which you would still need if you had lost the entire store or if it had become corrupt. The steps below show how to recover the full public folder store (in fact it is very similar to the way you recover any Exchange DB:
1. Ensure that the information store and system attendant services are running.
2. Next, if it is still mounted, dismount the store to be recovered
3. Next right click the Public Folder Store and select “Properties”
4. On the properties page select the “Database” tab
5. Select the checkbox next to “This database can be overwritten by a restore”
6. Click “OK”
7. Now open NTBackup and select the “Restore and Manage media” tab
8. In the left hand pane, drill down and locate the last good backup.
9. Select both the “Log Files” and the “Public Folder Store”
10. Click “Start Restore”
11. In the next window ensure that the server to “Restore To” is correct.
12. Enter a location for the restored logs to reside and if this is the last backup to restore (i.e. you have no incremental backups or differential backups left) then select “Last Restore Set”
13. Finally if you want to have the store automatically mount after the restore is finished select “Mount Database After Restore”
14. Click “OK” to begin the restore
At this point the backup will start and will restore the DB files over the top of the existing ones. It will also restore the logs to the temporary location specified. Once the restore is complete a hard recovery will begin. This means that Exchange first checks the logs in the temp directory and plays forward any required transactions. It then checks the live log files and plays them into the DB. Once this is done the store will be mounted.
If you try out any of the scenarios in this article and have problems please get in touch on the forum at http://www.mmmug.co.uk/forum
Finally the most important thing; test you backups! It is not nice to be doing this for the first time when you really need to get back some critical data and have managers breathing down your neck!
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