Issue with granulated exchange restore, missing mailboxes

[SPICIT]

Hello everyone,

I'm running a network with 15 servers of varying OS.  The 2 domain controllers are 2008 Standard servers (R1), Exchange 2007 SP2 is running on a seperate 2008 Standard server (R1).  BackupExec 12.5 is running with SEPM 11 on the same server running 2003 standard R2.  All other servers are backed up with the BackupExec remote agent utility running on them.

For whatever reason, an oddity occured and one of my users lost 1 month worth of email.  I went in to check the restore and his mailbox isn't listed, in fact, only 78 of about 150 mailboxes are showing.  I checked as far back as the restore wizard could show and his mailbox never shows up in the granulated restore.  Backups always succeed and verify with no errors.  We use a set of tapes to perform each backup.  I read that there was a hotfix for 12.5, tapes, and GRT, but the update says it came out after SP1, and according to my BackupExec interface I'm running Service Pack 4.  Attempts to manually install the update appear to do nothing (probably because it already has it?). 

So, I basically have 2 questions now, first, how can I reconfigure this so the remaining mailboxes show up?  LiveUpdate says BackupExec has every update installed.  Second, is it still possible to somehow extract just this user's mailbox out of the backup of the full info store?

[Kiran_Bandi]

Have you tried staging the backups form tape to disk?

[SPICIT]

Do you mean backup to like an external disk first, and then send that to the tape?  I haven't.

I'm a new IT person at this company, and I've sort of inherited the setup as the previous people set it up.  It is a GFS type backup scheme.  I'm not sure how I'd implement what you're suggesting to try it with this setup. 

Is there any way to check if one of the existing backups has this employee's mail in the store, or am I stuck creating another exchange server to mount it?

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Staging to disk = duplicating your Information Store to disk...follow the article below in order to do this:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/restoring-exchange-or-individual-mailboxesitems-using-backup-exec-howto

[Ken_Putnam]

What Kiran was asking is

Have you tried Duplicating the Store from tape to disk, and then restoring from disk?   (which you would have happen anyway, if the mailbox is on the tape.  It's just that BackupExec normally does it automatically)

[SPICIT]

Thanks for that info,

I'm going to try it, and I'll reply with the result.

[SPICIT]

You're all amazing, that worked perfectly.

Thanks for the help.