Restoring Exchange store gives 0xe0008488

[kenrinc]

I have need to restore an old copy of a message store from 5 years back.  We need to search for emails for legal reasons.  Nearly all of the accounts in this store are no longer in Active Directory.  I'm just letting you know this beforehand.  What I want to do is restore this old copy into a recovery storage group without mounting the store and then search against it.  Seems simple enough but I cannot get Backupexec to restore.  Whenever I try I get "0xe0008488 - Access is denied etc..." The problem is that I can restore single mailboxes from the "brick" part of the backup just not the entire store and I want to know why.  I've verified all account informaiton and it's all correct and been verified multipel times.  Testing shows that all accounts test successful.

When I execute the restore it begins, shows 188 bytes and then hangs for about 10minutes before coming back with the above error.  Can anyone shed any light on what I need to do to get this working?  All I want is the raw store from tape.  That's the goal.

Backup Exec 10d r5629, Exchange 2003 SP2

Ken-

[CraigV]

Ugh frik it! I thought it attached!
BE 10d should allow you to duplicate your backup to disk...it is basically taking it as a copy off tape, onto disk.
Did you go through that article a couple of posts above to see the steps to duplicate to disk?

[want2backup]

Craig.  I did go through that article and it seems that that process works well if you want to actually grab certain emails and or file folders.  I'm using Lucin8's Digiscope to "read" the raw Exchange .edb database so that's the file I want.  This process doesn't seem to allow for that as your left with a .BKF file on disk, not the raw data.  Please correct me if I'm wrong but I did go through the steps of doing a duplicate backup as noted in your post.  It left me with a .BKF of which I can look at with Backup Exec which is great for restores as you noted just not if you want to use a 3rd party app to look at the actual store.

Ken

[want2backup]

Craig, Just went through it again using your how to.  I am able to get the data off the tape and BE copies it to the backup to disk folder you create in the how-to. BE moves it off tape as BKF files which are unreadable by anything but BE.  At that point your instructions don't make much sense to me. It seems as if you are doing "brick" backups instead of standard message store backups.  When I select the image to restore I can select the message store but I cannot drill down into the store to get individual messages and mailboxes.  You would only be able to do that if you did a "brick" backup. Nobody does brick backups because they take 2 days minimum to complete.  I backup the message store only.

Ken

[CraigV]

Within BE I would have an IMG file from which I can install. When I browse to the actual folder I have duplicated too, I get the *.edb, *.stm and the logs that were created, along with the *.chk file.
I just used the same method a couple of weeks ago to restore a user's emails (I had to use PowerControls due to something that has now crept up in BE 2010, and prevents me from doing normal restores at our head office)...worked like a charm.
The other option is to post a couple of screenshots to get a better understanding.

[want2backup]

The first part of the instructions say to change the temp space from c:\temp to wherever you have free space because I'm assuming the files are staged here.  I never get any files there.  I only get logs, even after the restore. Then I go through the process of a duplicate backup from an old tape and the duplicate goes to the "Exchange Restore" folder we setup.  The files that appear in that folder after the duplicat backup are .BKF not raw data.

So that's where I'm trying to figure out how your getting raw data. A duplicate copy process is by deffinition .BKF files, not raw data.  Raw data would be in a restore operation.  My restore operation doesn't work. I get the same error I started this post with.  Pic 1 shows the results of the "New job to duplicate backup sets" operation in your instructions. Pic 2 is the catalog created in the previous operation. I select the store and click run now. Assuming this will go into RSG but that isn't mentioned in your instructions because I believe you are doing brick backups. Pic 3 is error.

Ken-

[want2backup · Accepted solution]

I finally solved this one.  After looking back through Craigs stuff it looks as if he's using 11d or later so I dissmissed that info out of version differences. It seems that when using the RSG feature of Exch 2003 there is an issue with pointing the RSG database files to a drive other than the live Exch drive. They must go to the same drive.   They were originally going to an external USB drive, which I could never make work. Once I changed the destiniation to a location on the drive that currently holds the live Exch stores, it worked. 

Now, I could not do this originally because, of course, I did not have enough space on that drive to do the restore, hence the USB drive.  I then ended up doing some housekeeping and was able to cleanup the drive to gain enough space to do a restore to an RSG.  It is a lame duck attempt by MS though.  Anyone who's dealt with Exch enough knows the hassle of dealing with not having enough disk space (for whatever reason) and not being able to redirect to another drive is just stupid. Maybe 2010 is better.  Not sure I'll be moving to it...  $.02

Ken-

[CraigV]

I actually need to update that doc...I use the same steps to do my Exchange restores through BE 2010 (and did it using BE 12.5 too).
Glad you got it sorted... :)