Hello World! Welcome to this blog. I am shipping containers to Azure @ Microsoft by day and author of this blog by night.
Most of the posts highlight what I am focused on and express work and personal experience. Reason I put them here - recall later or help someone else with similar challenge.
By default your Administrator's account does not have FullAccess permission to your mailboxes. This make your item level restore of Exchange items a bit complicated since you need to chase your mailbox owner for credentials.
CloudBerry Backup for Exchange introduced Item level restore for 2010. This feature is based on ese.dll (Extensible Storage Engine) and works with native MS APIs. Exchange backup plan leverages Windows Shadow Copy technology (VSS) and it guarantees backup consistency. Any Exchange plan configured with CBB triggers VSS provider, which initiates volume shadow (volume snapshot). Once done, backup engine starts to copy .edb and .log files (Database and transaction logs of Exchange). "Image based" backup for Exchange was introduced several years ago and in fact is still great solution for backup mail server off to cloud storage.
Missing (or corrupted DBs) or transaction logs of MS Exchange can be restored as flat files using Exchange Management Shell. This is super simple with CloudBerry Backup, have a look (this also explained in details in the above blog post, that I've mentioned earlier).
Essentially you will need Exchange Management Shell and deal with Eseutil to bring your database into a clean shutdown state. I believe there are massive number of posts in the Internet about this case. So CB gives you the tools to backup and recovery your data, while native utilities help to bring the state of your systems to the state before disaster happen.
Granular recovery helps system administrators save time on recovery missing items (email items, address book, calendar, notes, tasks etc). Eventually, everything in MS Exchange data is divided into different types, but they are all items. You may hear this feature called item level restore, brick level restore etc. It depends on the product manager and his creativity. But they all mean the same. Items of DBs.
Item level restore in CB for Exchange requires Exchange 2010. Due to APIs difference, it does not support 2007 and newer versions of MS mail server unfortunately. Check your data and logs backup in "Backup storage" section of the product UI and find out restore point you need to deal with.
Check "Item Level Restore" and it starts to bring your DBs and transaction logs (if you prefer) on-prem (streaming) in order to start utilizing Eseutil.
The following is the UI of brick level restore for it.
The problem here is that it won't work if we don't have FullAccess permissions for all (or at least for eugene.r@fiji.local) mailboxes. This is default behavior and we can change it. In order to change this, we need to do the following in our Exchange Management Shell (this is default utility on your Exchange server):
Get-MailboxDatabase -identity “DB_NAME” | Add-ADPermission -user "USER_NAME" -AccessRights GenericAll
Make sure you set DB_NAME and USER_NAME to yours. This will elevate your user's permissions to the highest with the ability to deal with other's mailbox in the defined DB (by the way, this rule will be applied to all new mailboxes later, so make sure you delegate permissions to the right person/user). Alternatively you can do this user by user in the Exchange Management Console, check the above example:
Depends on the case, but I think command line approach is much smarter. And this is relevant to other backup tools, that are based on the same architecture and offer item level restore. Hope it helps.
Stay tunes!
