Point-in-time mailbox restore

[charles-k]

Hi all,

I have a question about doing point-in-time restores of Exchange mailboxes that have been archived by EV.  Our EV is archiving emails when they become 6 months old, then deleting them when they become 5 years old.  I'm thinking about how I would do a point-in-time restore of a mailbox, let's say as of a year ago.  In this case, I would need to restore all emails/stubs that EV would've aged off during the past year, as well as restore all stubs that would've existed in the mailbox at that time, so that I wind up with a mailbox that has no stubs, only full messages.  My thought is to do a restore of EV to that point in time, and an Exchange mailbox restore to that point in time, then to associate the restored mailbox to the restored archive, then restore the archived items back to the mailbox.  Is this the correct approach, or even possible?  I'm interested in finding out how others are handling this type of scenario.

My environment -- EV 8 SP3 on W2K3 Std SP2, Exchange 2003 SP2, all clients are Outlook 2003.

Thanks in advance for any insight.


Charles

[AndrewB]

i think you have the right idea. one small note is that you can export a single archive to a specific mailbox which means you wouldn't actually have a step to "associate the restored mailbox to the restored archive" before you restore the archived items back to the mailbox.

on the compliance/legal side: it seems like you may have overlaps in your data retention policies which could put you at risk or completely defeat the purpose of your implementation of EV. just throwing it out there since i dont know all the reasons for your company archiving after 6 months and keeping email items for 5 years.

[charles-k]

AndrewB, thanks for your response.  Can I configure EV so that items that are aged off are recoverable up to a set time, for example, expired items can be recovered within 1 year of being expired?  Since user deleted items can be recovered within a configured number of days (in Site Properties | Archive Settings), I'm wondering if something similar can be configured for expired items.

Charles

[AndrewB · Accepted solution]

you can't fingure that and here's why: the reason for the difference in recovery between a user deleted and an expired item is that the expired item would be deleted by a policy. the user deleted item is still "allowed" to exist on the system and you can choose how long to have that recovery period enabled for.