Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of Patrick Miller
Patrick MillerFlag for United States of America

asked on

Recovering deleted e-mail from Exchange 2007 mailbox

We had an employee hard delete e-mails right before he was fired.  We don't know how to recover the items he deleted on the day he was fired.    Our exchange default is 14 days to hold deleted e-mail but we don't know how to recover them.
Avatar of Glenn Abelson
Glenn Abelson
Flag of United States of America image

Avatar of LeeDerbyshire
If the items were hard-deleted, you need to create a registry key:

http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid43_gci1024524,00.html

which makes Outlook show the Tools/Recover Deleted Items menu option for any folder, not just Deleted Items.  You need to select the appropriate folder before you attempt to recover anything deleted from it.
Avatar of Patrick Miller

ASKER

How do we view the contents of the Mailbox dumpster from the server?  
I don't think you can, without installing a client, like Outlook.  You can view hard-deleted items in OWA/Options, but only in the Inbox.  Items are kept in separate folders, even within the dumpster.
So does this regedit option only allow you to recover from Hard Deleted items after it has been put in effect?
It allows you to recover hard deleted items in any mailbox folder that are still within your configured Deleted Item Retention time on the Mailbox Store.
I have made the change on my pc and it does NOT allow me to recover Items that I just hard deleted.   It shows me the Recover Deleted Items but I only have 1 item in it and I just deleted 700 e-mails (1 in Inbox I hard deleted and 700 in Deleted Items)   None of those show up as being recoverable.   The default on the server is 14 days.   What is going on?
Nevermind they took about 20 minutes to show up but they are there now.   I just need to see if I had some I had hard deleted earlier that my registry change to show up.
Hm.  They don't usually take that long to appear.  Maybe it's a cached-mode thing.
If someone hard deleted the e-mail in the Deleted Items folder then that is permanent and cannot be recovered either way, correct?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of LeeDerbyshire
LeeDerbyshire
Flag of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
The items being deleted in the Deleted items folder DID reside in the retention period.  So why don't they show up.  Why was the employee able to remove them totally from the mailbox the day he left?
He definitely left within the last 14 days?
Yes sir.  That is what is bugging me.  We have been on the phone with BackupExec for 3 days trying to get the mailbox restored from Tape (exchange 2007) and they think we found a bug (or a new feature) that stops us from restoring a mailbox to the server.   So that is why I am trying to find out why the recover the deleted items is not working.
Okay, so they should be there.  Are you aware that you need to select the correct folder before you go to the menu, and select Recover Deleted Items. So, for example, if the user shift-deleted something that was in the Inbox, that means that it never touched the deleted items folder, so to find hard-deleted items that were in the Inbox, you need to select the Inbox folder first.  Similarly to find items purged from Deleted Items, you need to select the Deleted Items folder.
I went to the Sent Items folder and he deleted everything in it.    The same is true for the Deleted items folder.  There is nothing it the folder or nothing to Recover.
The only things I can think to check are:

1.  That your DIR time on the Mailbox Database is actually set to 14 days.
2.  That the user's mailbox does not have a per-mailbox override on that setting (check storage quotas on the mailbox in EMC).
3.  The user's Outlook profile is not set to deliver mail to Personal Folders.
1.   It is
2. Using Mailbox defaults
3. Not going to a personal folder.  

Thanks anyway.
Okay, sorry it didn't work.  This is normally straight-forward, and I can't think of anything that would explain why it isn't working.  Try a few more mailboxes, and see if it's just this one that's playing up.
Avatar of CDHhelpdesk
CDHhelpdesk

what specific problem did you run into with Backup Exec.  I just talked with Symantec support and was able to successfully restore individual emails to a users account.  There were some catches, like having Exchange Mangement console on the Media Server and a Client access MAPI update on the Exchange 2007 server.  Without these, backup exec cant talk to EX 2007.  Unfortunately with tape bacup it will have to stage the entire backup tape (or tapes) in order to find that one mailbox.  This took a long time, but this one customer used backup to disk folders and it was much faster.  
We had to patch BE and within the last 2 days we are able to restore individual mail to mailboxes.  We do have to stage the entire backup tape.   We were unable to use out RAID drives to stage the restore.  We had to hook an external drive and stage to that for the process to work.  BE has told us that it is a bug and that they are working on being able to restore to the RAID drives on our Exchange server.  I may change the Backups to Backup to Disk for Exchange 2007 mailbox backup in order to improved the process.   It took us 1.5 hours to restore the deleted mail out of the 1 mailbox.
We have an HP Autoloader and the restore process for 1 mailbox took almost 3 hours.  One of our clients that we do support for had Exchange 2007 and we were backuping up to a USB Hard Drive.  I found that the key to being able to restore fast is how big each backup (.bkf) file is.  If you make them 1 gb each (basically anthing that isnt just one file) if knows which file that information is in and can restore information very fast.  I noticed under the policy or job settings that the default staging folder is C:\Temp.  I would try and change that to an external hard drive, or just make a new policy to backup the exchange stores to a backup to disk folder.  I think we are going to be getting rid of the HP Auto loader, tapes just dont seem the way to go anymore.

My problem is that the Recover Deleted Items doesn't even appear on my Outlook 2007 menu.  I have already made the registry change, checked my deleted item retention on the Exchange Server and been testing this function.  One thing I am wondering: Exchange 2k7 does not install CDO objects by default and this install has not had them installed...yet.  Could that be part of the problem why I am not seeing the option on the Outlook menu, because Outlook does not see the CDO object on the Exchange server?