restoring specific emails.....

[BeezKneez]

  I've been tasked with restoring email from the past two years that is either from, to, or about an individual user. What is the easiest way to do this? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanx!

 -Brian-

[teiva-boy · Accepted solution]

 This is where an archiving product would save your butt...  Legal discovery is a pain aint' it?!

That said, depending on what version of BE, you may be able to at least restore emails based on the user using GRT, or via Recovery Storage Groups.  But you still have to sift through it manually to narrow down the amount of "static," you'll have to go through.  

Alternatively, you should get a good archiving product, and it would have paid for itself right about now...

[BeezKneez]

 I'm using 12.5 at the moment.

 Yeah, its funny because just the other da,y before this came up, I was starting to think about pricing out an email archive solution. Any suggestions for that?

[Colin_Weaver]

Hmm well Backup Exec is not really a good product for that - all you can do is restore information stores from sample dates within the period you are concerned about - but then you wil need something to index the stores and search for the name you are interested in.

In terms of Symantec Products you would have needed Enterprise Vault (possibly with the Discovery Accelerator) when the e-mails existed which would help you find the messages.

In theory you might be able to restore a server from a backup and then implement Enterprise Vault to index it - but you would almost certainly have to do this for multiple dates (as e-mails get deleted) so it would be fiddly and time consuming.