I'm looking for a good step-by-step guide that explains how to recover individual mailbox items using DPM 2010 and Exchange 2010. The "Protecting Exchange Server with System Center Data Protection Manager 2010" guide just glosses over it without giving detailed steps as does the TechNet article "How to Recover a Mailbox". I realize that in Exchange 2010, the default is 14 days for data recovery, so recovering mailbox items should be rare. At any event, I'm would like to test the process.
I realize that I need to restore the entire mailbox database, but if I'm short on disk space on the mail server, I have the option in DPM 2010 to recover the mailbox database to a network location or to tape. If I choose a network location, I would also create a recovery database on the Exchange 2010 server. As I understand it, the recovery database needs to reside on the Exchange server, whereas the DPM restore would reside in the network location I had previously specified. Once the mailbox database is restored to this network location, the following PS command will create a recovery database on the Exchange server:
new-mailboxdatabase -Recovery -Name RDB -Server MBX1 -EdbFilePath "D:\RDB\Database\RDB.edb" -LogFolderPath "E:\RDB\RD100\Logs"
This I presume creates a blank recovery database location on the Exchange server. I would then need to issue the PS restore command, “Restore-Mailbox -Identity usera -RecoveryDatabase “RDB” (assuming the name of the user mailbox is usera) to restore the mailbox database recovered by DPM from the specified network location.... BUT how does this restore-mailbox command know to pull the mailbox from this network location over to this recovery database on the Exchange server?
Another option if all of this has to reside on the Exchange server is to attach a large USB drive to the Exchange server to use for the recovery database. The pain is that I am running Exchange 2010 as a Hyper-V and so I would have to go through some steps to attach this drive to the Hyper-V which is a bit of a pain.
Some clarification would be much appreciated... I'll then go and test it all out.
Thanks!