Restoring mailbox to original state after archiving

[Sergy_Stouk]

A group of our business users has been e-mail archived  and now we have to restore all their vaulted items back into mailboxes. Archiving them was a planning mistake.

Using archive explorer or a restore option from search to restore all items does work, however it creates a second copy of each item and does not remove the shortcut.

I am looking for a streamlined solution to recover all vaulted items from vault back into their mailbox and clear the icons altogether.

The plugin is going to be removed from their PC clients and clicking on the shortcut will produce a recall error - the shortcut has to be removed by the recovery process or as a separate cleanup script if this is possible.

We are restoring up to 100 mailboxes with several hundred archived items from various sub-folders in each one of them, some of the folders and items were deleted.

Is there any way to see which shortcuts were deleted by the user and skip restoring them altogether?

Any ideas on how to script this action instead of spending up to an hour for each mailbox for manual recalls, cleanups and verifications?

Thank you.

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

Well I don't think you are going to find a 100% hands off solution.  Couple things come to mind though.

You could use the Export Archive wizard and either restore the entire archive back to the mailbox, this will however restore back items that had their shortcut deleted if they are still in the archive.  You should also note this technote: Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH126887  Even though it may not be perferct I think it is the closest to doing what you want.

Otherwise you could export the archive to pst, set the shortcut deletion option for those mailbox to 1 days so all their shortcuts are removed, give them their pst and let them move the items back into their mailbox themselves.  (Fat chance they will want to do that though, I am sure!)

**here is the link to use Export Archive Wizard:

Article URL http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO37344

[Rob_Wilcox1]

I think Tony is right.  There is no zero-day option on this.  It's fairly easy to put a script together to delete all the shortcuts in a mailbox.  Did you archive just IPM.Note, or did you do calendar items etc?

[Abhijit_Soman]

Just to add Tony's post...

Disable archiving for the user for which you have enabled so that as per the archiving task schedule, it will not archive the mails and also users will not be able to archive mails manually.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Is there anything else needed on this issue?

[DavidO]

We have an application designed for just this situation.  It can run on the EV server, and will restore only the items for which it finds shortcuts, and deletes the short-cut of each message after doing the restore.  It also keeps any properties that may have been set on the short-cuts, such as a follow-up reminder, or category.

Follow the link for more detils.

http://www.vault-solutions.com/ourproducts/archive-accelerator-restore.html

Thanks,

Dave

http://www.vault-solutions.com

[Rob_Wilcox1]

That looks pretty cool David.