Single Mailbox Recovery Restore

In this tutorial I will guide you through restoring a single mail item using Netapp’s Single Mailbox Recovery. Parts of this tutorial have been blurred out for security and privacy reasons. If you have not already installed the pre-requisites and Single Mailbox Recovery please click here.

1. There are two parts to restoring mail with Single Mailbox Recovery. First we have to mount the snapshot using SnapDrive and secondly use Single Mailbox Recovery to restore the item. So first up, lets open up SnapDrive on the Single Mailbox Recovery server. This server has to have iSCSI connectivity to the SAN and have access to the snapshots.

2. Expand the server and click on disks.

3. In the right hand pane click on Connect Disk and the wizard will fire up. Click Next.

4. Enter in the Storage System Name and click Add. You will then be able to browse the list of volumes on the San. Browse to the Volume containing the Exchange Database that you wish to recover. Browse all the way into the volume’s .snapshot directory and then select the snapshot date that you wish to restore from. Click Next.

5. Select Dedicated and click Next.

6. Assign a drive letter or you can use a Volume Mount Point if you don’t have any drive letters left. Click Next.

7. Select the iSCSI Initiator that you wish to use and click Next.

8. Select Manual so that you can specify the igroup. Click Next.

[ad#sysadmintutorialsRectanglePosts]9. Select the igroup and click Next.

10. A brief summary is displayed. Click Finish.

11. You can now see that I have the snapshot mounted as E: This concludes the first part of the recovery.

12. Now for the second part. Open up Single Mailbox Recovery.

13. Click File menu – Open Source. In the Source File field click Browse and browse to the snapshot drive that we mounted in the previous step. In this tutorial it’s the E: and select the *.edb file that you wish to restore from. You can leave the rest as default. Click Ok.

14. If you don’t specify the log file directory in the previous step you will see this message. You can click Ok and dismiss the warning.

15. The source is now mounted and you will see all the mailboxes belonging to that Mailbox Store in the left hand window pane. Now that we have the source open that we want to restore from we need to open up the destination.

16. You can restore to a PST file, Live Exchange Server or CAS (Check the documentation in the Resources section for an explanation on Content Analysis Store). In this tutorial we will recover to a live Exchange Database. Click on the File Menu – OpenCreate Target – Open Targe Exchange Server. Select Connect to a single mailbox and enter in the Mailbox Name and Server Name then click Ok./span>

17. The Target/Destination is now open. To restore a file or folder from Source to Target you can simply browse to the location of the email i.e. Inbox select the email with the mouse and drag and drop it into the Target/Detination folder, for example to the Inbox.

18. Once we have finished restoring items we must disconnect the mounted snapshot. Exit from Single Mailbox Recovery. Open up SnapDrive. Highlight the drive that you have mounted the snapshot as, in this case it’s the E:, right click on it and select Disconnect Disk. You must do this otherwise your next backup run will not be successful.

19. Click Yes when asked if you are sure you want to disconnect the disk.

Disclaimer:
All the tutorials included on this site are performed in a lab environment to simulate a real world production scenario. As everything is done to provide the most accurate steps to date, we take no responsibility if you implement any of these steps in a production environment.