Recovering Email from Exchange 2010 using Shadow Protect

I had an opportunity to do a recovery on a few mailboxes from a site running Exchange 2010 and Shadow Protect.

So the procedure i used was simply to copy the database and log files from the shadow protect mounted backup to a folder on a drive that has enough space to restore the database to.  Lucky for me the database was small, only 8GB.

I copied the database logs to a folder called "Recovery" and under that folder i had speparate folders for both the logs and database.  One thing to remember is if the log files

So my folder stricture is:

X:\Recovery\Logs - Copy the exchange logs from the backup to here
X:\Recovery\Database - Copy the database from the backup to here

After the files have been copied i followed the instructions on these web pages to setup the dataabse as a recovery database within the production Exchange environment.

http://msexchangeguru.com/2010/05/23/exchange2010-recovery-database/

http://msexchangeguru.com/2009/07/12/exchange-database-recovery-using-eseutil-commands/

http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2011/02/working-with-exchange-2010-recovery-databases-2/

The problem with exporting mail from a recovery database is the fact that you CANT!!

You have to restore the mailbox from the recovery database to a temp mailbox on the production database THEN you can use the cmdlet "new-mailboxexportrequest" to export the mail to PST.

There is an explanation within the last web page regarding the cmdlet used to restore mail from the recovery mailbox to the production investigation mailbox which I've pasted below and highlighted important parts:

Restore-Mailbox -RecoveryMailbox “1234, test” -Identity ex2010 -RecoveryDatabase RecoveryDatabase -TargetFolder “RecoveredItems” -StartDate 1/1/2010 -EndDate 12/31/2010

A few things to note about the command above:

First off, the source and target mailboxes can get a little confusing. Think of the Recovery-Mailbox as the source mailbox, and the Identity mailbox as the target mailbox. When entering my command, the contents of test1234 residing in the recovery database were restored to a subfolder called RecoveredItems in the mailbox called ex2010.

Second, the Recovery-Mailbox switch only accepts the Display Name of your source mailbox. Using the Exchange Alias will not work. If you try to use anything other than Display Name you will receive an error similar to the following:

Mailbox “test1234” doesn’t exist on database “RecoveryDatabase”

Believe me, this will frustrate you because you will see the mailbox definitely exists if you use the Get-MailboxStatistics command. Microsoft does not document the fact that the Restore-Mailbox switch only accepts Display Name very well so hopefully this will save you some time.

Once you have the hang of the procedure, it becomes easier to restore data as long as your backup is OK.

-Fr33ze

Office 365, Primary Email Address and Alias Email Addresses

We have a new client who we are moving to Office 365, part of the setup i have used DirSync to move their usernames to Office 365, I had run into an issue where i pretty much couldn't change anything because it was syncd with AD.  Well ok so what????

I decide to google away and found a couple of articles that i assume just scratches the surface of AD, DirSync and Office 365.

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/410677-office-365-w-ad-sync-primary-email-address-woes

http://enterpriseit.co/office365/create-email-alias-dirsync/

The above articles explain using the proxyAddresses attribute within AD to add alias to email accounts within Office 365.

Basically you add the emails addresses to the proxyAddresses attribute in this format:

SMTP:main_email_address@company.com
smtp:alias@company.com
smtp:another_alias@company.com

Note:  Using upper case SMTP denotes Default Reply address.

-Fr33ze

Changing networks from Public to Private.

I was trying to access a Windows Server 2012 R2 box from behind an IPSEC VPN and i though that was going to be hard but it turns the hardest thing was trying to make this standalone server change its network profile from Public to Private.

In the end i followed this guide specifically "Option 4", the onyl thing to remember is to restart the computer.

-Fr33ze