Backup Exec - Need to restore a 2003 Exchange mailbox

[jeden]

Hi Everyone

Here is the position I find myself in.  The boss needs an exchange mailbox restored from a staff member who left in 2011.

Since then, we have migrated off Novell to Windows, are on a new domain and we are two mail servers ahead and two backup servers ahead of where we were when the staff member was here.

I have a full backup of the 2003 Exchange server from the end of 2012 (before the migration) to AIT tapes and the backup server at that time was Windows Server 2003 running Backup Exec 2010 (a physical server I still have in a back room).  I used GRT and can see the mailbox I need.

The user never existed in our new AD so I have no mailbox to restore to.  If I create a new mailbox on our new domain with Exchange 2013 can I restore a mailbox from Exchange 2003 into it?

So far we have tried or thought about trying:

Using Veeam Explorer for Exchange to open the edb (we still have the original exchange vm and can see the file) but it doesn't work prior to Exchange 2010.

Using an edb reader to browse the file but the content we seek isn't there.

Thought about restoring the information store (doing a tape to disk replication) and then copying it to a newer backup server using Backup Exec 2014 to restore to pst. Our newer backup servers use LTO and we cannot attach the AIT drive.

Any suggestions would be gratefully accepted.  

[CraigV]

...do you have the Exchange *.edb on disk? If so look at an application like Kernel for Exchange which works like a charm.

I used to use this in conjunction with Backup Exec when I needed to pull emails out into *.pst format. Duplicated to disk with BE (which backed up the Information Store) and then Kernel for Exchange to pull the raw data out of the flat file.

You won't be able to restore Exchange 2003 data into Exchange 2013...this is a Microsoft limitation.

Thanks!

[Colin_Weaver]

You can only restore Exchnage data back into the same version of Exchnage as it came from.

However if you ha a GRT enabled backup then there is another option, upgrade the version of Backup Exec to one of the versions that supports a redirect restore ro PST and then install a supported 32bit Outlook version onto the Backup Exec server and redirect the restore to PST on the Backup Exec server itself.

If you want to play safe you could possibly keep ypour 2010 serve and build a new srever for the newer BE version, connect the tape drive to it and cataog the tape to do the restore and therefore jkeep youroriginal backu server untouched.

Note: I suspect Craig V's option might well work and could potentially be a simpler operation (his option needs a GRT enabled backup that you duplicate back to disk if it was on tape to get at  the EDB file)

[jeden]

Thank you for the suggestions.

We wanted to leave the Windows 2003 Server with Backup Exec 2010 alone so we created another backup server.  Fortunately, we had another retired physical server with the same hardware so installed Windows Server 2008 and Backup Exec 2012 and Office 2010.  We then catalogued the tapes and were able to restore the mailbox required using the restore to pst function.