Applies to: Exchange Server 2010 SP3, Exchange Server 2010 SP2

Topic Last Modified: 2012-01-22

A recovery database (RDB) is a special kind of mailbox database that allows you to mount a restored mailbox database and extract data from the restored database as part of a recovery operation. After you've created an RDB, you can restore a mailbox database into the RDB by using your backup application (or if you have the database and its log files in the file system, by copying them to the RDB file structure). Then you can use the New-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet to extract data from the recovered database. After being extracted, the data can then be exported to a folder or merged into an existing mailbox. RDBs allow you to recover data from a backup or copy of a database without disrupting user access to current data.

Looking for other management tasks related to RDBs? Check out Recovery Databases.

Prerequisites

  • An RDB must be created. For detailed steps, see Create a Recovery Database.

  • The database and log files containing the recovered data must be restored or copied into the RDB folder structure that was created when the RDB was created.

  • The database must be in a clean shutdown state. Because an RDB is an alternate restore location for all databases, all restored databases will be in a dirty shutdown state. You can use Eseutil /R to put the database in a clean shutdown state.

Use the Shell to recover data using a recovery database

You need to be assigned permissions before you can perform this procedure. To see what permissions you need, see the "Mailbox recovery" entry in the Mailbox Permissions topic.

Note:
You can't use the EMC to restore data using an RDB.

This example restores the source mailbox that has the MailboxGUID 1d20855f-fd54-4681-98e6-e249f7326ddd on mailbox database DB1 to the target mailbox with the alias Scott.

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New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SouceDatabase DB1 -SourceStoreMailbox 1d20855f-fd54-4681-98e6-e249f7326ddd -TargetMailbox Scott

This example restores the content of the source mailbox that has the display name Scott Schnoll on mailbox database DB1 to the archive mailbox for scott@contoso.com.

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New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceDatabase DB1 -SourceStoreMailbox "Scott Schnoll" -TargetMailbox scott@contoso.com -TargetIsArchive

For detailed syntax and parameter information, see New-MailboxRestoreRequest.