On prem exchange mailbox recovery through DPM

[dapaulio]

Environment

On prem Exchange 2010 in hybrid mode

Mailboxes protected by daily backup to dpm 2012r2

 

Scenario

Investigation in to emails sent between 2 students where they have both deleted the email and deleted it from the deleted items.

Unfortunately the retention policy we had has now removed it from the recover deleted items deleted items... [emoji848]🤪 hope you are still following

 

What I have done so far

Created a recovery user with a mailbox called recovereduser

 

Created and mounted a new recovery database in exchange

New-mailboxdatabase -recovery -name ... -edbfilepath ... blah blah. DONE

 

Recovered the dpm protected mailbox to recovery dB on exchange.... recovery was successful

 

Ran powershell to restore mailbox to the recovereduser... problem occurred

 

My Problem

The mailbox does not exist in the recoverydb. Why???

I can see that the database is somewhat equivalent in size to the database I was recovering

 

If I run get-mailbox -database recoverydb

No results are returned meaning no mailboxes in the database

 

Any help would be appreciated

[dapaulio]

Worked it out.

It turned out my last ps cmd

Restore-mailbox -identity name -recoverydatabase rdb1 -recoverymailbox mailbox

 

The variables mailbox and name was expecting display names rather than what I was using which was the samaccount name

[ITGuyWestMidlands]

Nice one. I'd look at switching to Veeam, or consider a transport rule to copy all student emails to special mailbox to access when needed. DPM not supporting single item recovery is insane.

[dapaulio]

We did have a journal that held all emails for the current year, then PST off for a further many years (until a come to housekeep them tbh ) but I ended up disabling a few months ago it due to space issues.

Typical really for years I have never had to consult the journal and within months of disabling bang it would have been helpful in this scenario.

There is a bigger plan in the pipe to move into o365.