Restoring very old mailbox backups

[AndrewDu]

I've been asked to restore some Exchange 2003 mailbox backups from 2009.

I have the tapes, they are mailbox-level backups (ie not file-level backups of the .edb) and were created by Backup Exec 12. These users left years ago and no longer have Active Directory accounts or live mailboxes.

I still have the Backup Exec 12 installation working OK.

However I do not have the Exchange 2003 installation or the 2003 server that it ran on.

Our environment has been migrated to Exchange 2010 running on 2008R2 servers with a DAG.

What options do I have?

This version of BE doesn't seem to have any "restore to PST" options. Nor does it know anything about DAGs or Exchange 2010.

With the backups I have there does not seem to be any way to restore the .edb file(s) entirely.

Do I have to install an Exchange 2003 environment? What impact will that have on the Active Directory?

Somewhat baffled as to the best way to approach this, all sensible suggestions very welcome.

Thanks in advance.

[ZeRoC00L]

If you have a valid maintenance contract, you better upgrade to BE2012 that can restore to PST.

[pkh]

You have to restore the mailboxes into Exchange 2003. This is a Microsoft restriction, not BE. An alternative is to duplicate the backup set to disk. In the .IMG folder which will be created, you will be able to find the .edb file. You then use some third party to to exact the mailboxes

[Colin_Weaver]

Hmm with Backup Exec 12.0 and Exchange 2003 I have a feeling Brick Level Backups may have still been possible, as such you may need to know if they were perfoming a GRT enabled information store backup or a Brick Level (mailbox) backup or just an information store backup without either of the mailbox specific choices.

1) If you were using a GRT enabled Info store backup you might be able to restore  via a PST if you upgrade to Backup Exec 2014

2) if you were using a GRT enabled info store backup, you might be able to duplicate the tape set back to disk  which should create edb fles etc in an IMG folder. If this works you might then be able to find 3rd party tools to extract the data from the ebd etc files.

3) if you were doing brick level backups and do not have an information store backup I believe you will have to build recovery environment to get back the mailboxes (so build an Exchnage 2003 server in domain with the same organization names etc which is very time consming process and assumes you know enought facts to set it up)

4) If you have an information store backup (that was not GRT enabled) then you will probably need to build a recovery environment and possibly use a recovery storage group to get back the info store (again you will probably need to build the same origanization and may also need to use 3rd party tools to get at the data afterwards.)

You cannot do any form of GRT/mailbox or information store restore back to different version of Exchange. PST might be possible although if GRT backups were performed then option 2 might be the better choice although we cannot specifically suggest any utilities to extract the data if you get the edb back.