asked on

Exchange disaster recovery

Hello,

I have a question about extreme Exchange disaster recovery plans :-)
e.g. Exchange server crashes and this kind of server recovery is not possible:
https://www.stellarinfo.com/blog/setup-m-recoverserver-switch-exchange-server-2010-2013-2016/
The only way is to install new exchange server and configure new mailboxes for AD users without
mailbox migration,extract pst from old server .edb(or from client outlooks) and import pst to new exchange server mailboxes.
What would be migration steps in this extreme case?

Thank you

M A

if you have EDB files from the old server you can recover the server (Setup.exe /Mode:RecoverServer) and mount the database with this EDB.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/high-availability/disaster-recovery/recover-exchange-servers?view=exchserver-2019

Install new windows server and move the EDB to the server check edb is safe shutdown or no by the below command
eseutil /mh "c:\databases\mymailboxdatabse.edb"

Alex

You'd have to run a restore from a backup for the exchange databases. Essentially even if you lose exchange, your AD users should still have their settings. If you lost AD, that's a whole different issue.

Steven Atencio

I actually had to work in a scenario where something like that happened. Exchange server died and there were no good backups for it. We managed to get exchange itself working however the databases were screwed. What we wound up doing was pulling the cached mailboxes from all the users workstations and converting them to pst's and then importing them into exchange for each user. It was a mess and tediously slow but it worked. We had 100+ users we had to do this for and only a handful of emails were lost and maybe 2-3 users whose outlook wasn't set up to cache correctly lost some old emails.

Needless to say we convinced them we needed a second exchange server and some actual backup procedures after this.

Andy M

ASKER

Steven,
Thats what I want to know :-)
So,database was crashed with no valid backup?
So,did you create new database and new mailboxes and than what?Detach AD user from old mailboxes via adsi edit or?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Steven Atencio

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Andy M

ASKER

Steven thank you for sharing your experience :-)
You helped me a lot
One of my colleague told me long time ago that he did something similar to you but he recovered mailboxes not only to different database but to another mail server.
And he mentioned ost to pst conversion on every single workstation but I cant remember how he detach AD user from old mailbox because it is not possible that one AD user have two mailboxes.
Maybe re/home mailboxes is the solution
„Create a New Database and Re-home all mailboxes to new databases and import PSTs
to Re-home all mailboxes to another database you can run the commands below:
Get-Mailbox -Database <Source/CorruptedDatabase> | Set-Mailbox -Database <NewDatabase>
Please note that after running this command you may have to reconfigure profile in case if outlook clients are Outlook 2003. For Outlook 2007 and 2010 and later you may close and reopen outlook.“
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/lync/en-US/236b1d0d-d769-4e7e-a446-413841b1a9df/moving-mailboxes-of-corrupted-database-in-exchange-2010?forum=exchange2010

Has anyone tried re-home mailboxes to another mail server if old exchange is beyond recovery?

PRADIIP SINGH

Yes I have done for many and it does work, you will not face any issues unless the organization name remains the same,

Also when you re-home it will pickup the Database name so server name would not come in to picture