Easiest way to recover emails from tapes created on old SBS server?

[Magnus911]

Hi,

from 2006-2009 our company used a SBS 2003 with backupexec 10d. We did a month end backup every month and stored the tapes. In early 2009, we migrated to SBS2008 w/ Exchange 2007 on a new server and upgraded to 12.5d/

Now, I have been asked to recover all the emails from the period 2006-2009 and search them for particular recipients to answer a compliance request.

Our new server does now uses a different version of exchange than before and does not have a tape drive.

I still have access to the old server and the tape drive.

What is the easiest way for me to recover all the emails from these tapes and then search through them? Should I install server 2003 and exchange 2003 on this server and recover all the tapes into the database? Is there not an easier way or another option for recovering all the data to hard drives and then being able to search through them?

Thanks in advance. My experience with Backupexec is not great as we didn't need data from these tapes before. However, having searched the forums and google for a while I think I am going to run into a lot of problems in this case.

[Ben_L_]

Do you know what type of Exchange backups were done in the previous version? Were you doing information store backups and mailbox level backups or just one of these?

[Magnus911]

I'm pretty sure they were information store backups and mailbox backups. What's the difference between the two / how would i know?

In the past, if i've gone to do a recovery of some data, the data tree is called 'information store' i think and when you click the + you see all the mailboxes...

[Ben_L_]

Well before we go to far into that, when you upgraded from 2003 to 2007, was everything migrated over or did you start fresh on the new server?  If everything was migrated over then all your emails should still be on the server.  If they were archived off or were moved over in the upgrade then we'll need to go foward with the restore.

With 10d the Exchange backups were a bit different.  You'll need to load up one of the tapes and see what restore selections are available, either Exchange Information Store or Exchange Mailboxes.  They are different in version 10d.

[Magnus911]

Ok I'm going to start on this tomorrow morning first thing. Thanks.

[Magnus911]

By the way, when we migrated, everything was copied across. But as you can imagine, with 50 users, people are archiving mail all the time. So i need to be able to go back to the beginning of 2008 and pull every email that may or may not since have been archived by a user.