Exchange 2003 Deleted Items...

[Stephen_Reece]

Hello:
I am using BE 10d Rev. 5629 w/ SP3 installed.

I have set up Exchange 2003 to retain deleted items for 35 days so that I have all email in the system supposedly being backed up on an end-of-month tape which is then removed from circulation. This is working as people can go to recover deleted email from within Outlook and it works.

Recently, I restored email from a few months ago to a new AD user and mailbox. Outlook showed that no retained deleted messages were restored. This leads directly to my question of best practices or how to accomplish this.

I need to know how to make BE get a hold of the retained deleted messages. I want to have a copy of every single email that comes through here on an end-of-month tape, even if it is received and deleted on the same day before a backup job can run. There must be a way to do this, right? I have to be able to recover any message for every mailbox we have. It's an absolute necessity.

Thanks,
Stephen

[Stephen_Reece]

Just to clarify, I am using Exchange 2003's built-in Mailbox Store Deletion Settings option to keep deleted items for 35 days. Peoplle can then use the Outlook client to go to Tools --> Recover Deleted Items to get these items back, even if they are Shift-Deleted. I need to find a way for BE to backup and restore these items on an end-of-month tape.

Thanks,
Stephen

[Ken_Putnam]

Are you talking about restoreing from a Stores backup or a MailBox backup?

When you delete an item using Shift-Del, it will not appear in the Deleted Items folder, so a mailbox backup will not grab it. 

I'd have to play with it a bit to determine if a Stores backup would still grab a Shift-Deleted item

[Stephen_Reece]

Hello:
Thanks for your reply. I realize that Shift-Deleting will remove the email from the user's mailbox. However, it must still exist in the information store and be linked to the mailbox, as Outlook is able to see these messages for a user's account in a window when using the Tools --> Recover Deleted Items tool. Given this, would I have to restore the entire Exchange store to see these items? Is it even possible to back these items up?

Thanks,
Stephen

[Ken_Putnam]

Given this, would I have to restore the entire Exchange store to see these items?

I would think so

Is there some legal or reporting reason that you have to be able recover every single item that has ever existed on your system?

[Stephen_Reece]

Well, there's the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for one, plus I have a boss that just wants it to work this way.

In this case, I just need to find a single email that was deleted in July.

So should I just keep a dummy mail server up specifically for restoring the store? Can the store be redirected to a different Exchange server, even? Would it be better to create a second store on the mail server so that I can avoid having to buy a costly Exchange remote agent?

Thanks,
Stephen

[Ken_Putnam]

Since you are running Ex2003, if you have the disk space, you could create a Recovery Storage Group and restore to that

With Ex2000 and earlier you did indeed need a standby server that could hold the entire IS