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the purpose of Exchange 2010 Recovery Database

Exchange 2003 used recovery storage group. I remember Adminstrators used to restore Exchange database to RSG then used Exmerge, which is free tool from Microsoft, to export mailboxes to the existing database, I cannot remember if Exmerge can export individual items other than user mailboxes.
However for companies that have Backup software solutions such as Comvault, they can restore individual items straight from the backup using Comvault without going through RSG.

Exchange 2010 uses Recover database, Nowadays most of the backup solutions have the ability to restore individual mailboxes or individual items straight from the backup instead of going through the method of creating Recover Database then using powershell to restore individual mailboxes.

My question is if a company has a backup solution, then would Exchange 2010 Administrators have to worry about using Recover database?

Thank you

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bigeven2002

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Simon Butler (Sembee)

Item level recovery by third party products isn't supported by Microsoft and can actually cause corruption of the database.
Therefore if you were doing a restore under the guidance of Microsoft support, then you would restore to a recovery database and then restore the items from there.

I only do full database backups, nothing else, which means that recovery database is the only option available to me. Although I haven't had to recover outside of a full database restore for some years - increasing the deleted item retention time I find covers most eventualities.

Simon.

jskfan

ASKER

So if I have a database of hundreds of Gigs, I still have to restore it to a Recover Database in order to restore from there a mailbox item ?

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