Any Exchange 2003 Gurus not on holiday? Restore and Cached Q

[OutToLunch]

Any Exchange guru's not on holiday and still lurking? Just a quick query - in the middle of attempting to recover from a HD failure on our Exchange server, backups are obviously 24 hr behind current data.

Users work in cached Exchange mode, so at the moment their Outlook is offline but has all their mail up to the point of the HD exploding...

If I restore the Information Store from backups then users reconnect, is the local cache/connect a two way process? i.e Outlook says to Exchange "Hang on, I also have this this this and this" and sends mail it has but the server doesn't back, or is it one way, ie Exchange says to Outlook "No, you never had that mail!" *zap*?

If it's the latter, are there any ways to avoid losing the last chunk of mail users received after the backup of the night before? I can think of running round, exporting all users mailboxes on their PC to PST then reimporting after reconnection but it seems like logic would suggest there's an easier way...

Any clues?

Cheers.

B

[Oops_my_bad]

I use backup exec if I need to restore (so it might be different depending on what backup solution you use).. what I've experienced in the past is the mailstore is restored to the server from whatever point it was (assuming a total loss). When clients connect the changes are merged so it should be fairly consistent. Test it on a mailbox first to be sure.

Also sometimes whats happened is if Ive restored a mailbox that already exists, all items are duplicated.

[OutToLunch]

Cheers for that - just to check, when you say "when clients connect, changes are merged" you are meaning that no mail which exists in local copies of Outlook but not on Exchange is lost?

(Just using NTBackup here on SBS so god knows what'll happen - fingers crossed for luck!)

[Marvintpa]

The users should not loose anything. I agree with teddykgb all mail will get merged ..and the worse that should happen is a few duplicated messages