Backup for Workgroups has an add-on that you
can use to restore individual Exchange email messages without interrupting or altering
your Exchange Server.
Overview
Backup for Workgroups (BFW) backs up the message stores from your Exchange
Server. The backup copy of your Exchange Message Store can be restored in
its entirety if you have a disaster or you can use the Exchange Message Restore
(EMR) add-on to restore selected messages from the backup copy.
With the Exchange Message Restore Add-on activated in BFW 7.0 or higher, you can view
backed up mailboxes, folders and messages and you
can restore individual email messages while your Exchange Server runs normally,
without any interruption. In other words, you do not need to take your
Exchange Server down, or alter the Exchange Server in any way to
restore individually selected email messages.
What is Brick Level Backup and Brick Level Restore ?
The term "Brick Level" - means that you are performing a task at
the mailbox or email message level; not at the Exchange Mailbox Store level.
Some backup programs offer brick level backup, which means the backup program
only backs up the email messages. Brick Level backup is usually significantly slower
than complete mailbox store backup. Brick level backup is an incomplete
backup solution
because your Exchange Server stores more than just email messages, such as calendar information
which is skipped with
brick level backup. As a result, backup programs offering brick level
backup need to
perform complete mailbox store backup also, which in effect causes duplicate backups.
Backup for Workgroups performs complete backups of the Exchange mailbox stores,
while offering brick level restore capabilities.
Brick Level Restore - means that you can restore email messages within a
mailbox without having to restore all the mailboxes and you do not need to
restore the entire Exchange mailbox store. Backup for Workgroups offers
Brick Level Restore with the Exchange Message Restore add-on.
Compare the process of restoring email with and without the Exchange Message
Restore add-on
Without using the Exchange Message Restore Addon, the traditional method to restore email messages is:
Backup the current Exchange mailbox stores in their entirety.
Stop the Exchange Services - stop all services associated with Exchange.
Delete or Move all mailbox stores and their log files.
Run a restore of the Exchange mailbox stores and select a date in the
past when the messages you want to restore existed (before they were
deleted).
Disconnect the Exchange Server from the Internet to prevent processing
email while you have the old mailbox stores in use.
Start the Exchange Services and use an Outlook client to extract the
email from Exchange to a PST file.
Stop the Exchange Services again.
Delete the restored Exchange mailbox stores.
Restore the most current Exchange mailbox stores from step 1.
Reconnect the Exchange Server to the Internet.
Start the Exchange Service.
Go to an Outlook client and import the extracted email messages.
As you can see the traditional route to restore an email message is very time
consuming and has significant risk associated with it.
Now for the process of restoring email when using the Exchange Message Restore
Addon:
Go to the Exchange Server, run Backup for Workgroups, go to Restore ->
Exchange Message Restore.
Select the date in the past when the email existing and Backup for
Workgroups will pull a copy of that version of the Exchange mailbox store
from the Backup Server and create a temporary mailbox store in a temp folder
so that the production mailbox store is not altered.
Select the Exchange mailbox / the email user account that held the
email. Backup for Workgroups displays the folder view of that users
account in a view similar to Outlook.
Select the email messages you want to restore, this can be individual
messages and folders of email messages.
Specify the email server and the email address to send send the restored
email to.
Begin the restore.
The restored email message will be sent to the inbox of the specified
recipient. Note that when you use the Backup for Workgroups Exchange
Message Restore add-on, the production Exchange Server is never interrupted
nor modified. Also the entire time for the restore is minutes instead
of hours or days as with the traditional route.
System Requirements
You will need a VERSION 7 Backup for Workgroups Client with the Backup for Workgroups
Open File add-on installed on your Exchange Server. You will also need the Exchange Mailbox Restore Add-on license.
Supported Versions of Exchange
Exchange 2010, 2007, 2003.
Watch a video about how easy it is to restore Exchange Email Messages
Follow these steps to restore email messages with the Exchange Message
Restore add-on
Once you have installed a Version 7 Backup Client license and a license
for the EMR Addon, you can restore messages from your Exchange Server backup
data. And yes, if you have been performing backups of your Exchange
Server and need to restore messages from the past, you can purchase the EMR
license and it will be able to restore messages that were backed up before
the license was purchased/activated.
Now, go to your Exchange Server computer. At your Exchange Server, run Backup for Workgroups.
When you have the EMR Addon license, the Restore panel on the Backup Client
for your Exchange Server is fully operational. Notice that this button
is present when using BFW in evaluation/trial mode, but you can only restore
messages once you have purchased an EMR license.
On the Restore panel, press the “Exchange
Message” button.
If you do not see the Exchange Message button, then you are running an older
version of Backup for Workgroups. You will need to both upgrade your Backup
Server and Backup Client running on your Exchange Server to version 7.0 or
higher and you will need to purchase an
Exchange Message Restore add-on license.
The Exchange Mailbox Restore panel is divided into three (3) areas in
which you perform a step in each. In the top portion of this dialog,
you perform Step 1. Let's proceed through the 3 Steps on the Exchange
Mailbox Restore panel in order.
Step 1 - Press the "Select Mailbox Store" button. This is where you
are going to select the appropriate Mailbox Store, by backup date, from
which you want mail "restored from."
You will see a list of mailbox stores that were defined in Exchange Server
along with recent backup dates for each store. Select a date before the
email was deleted and then select the Exchange Mailbox Store that held that
particular message. Private Stores hold email for individual users.
The Private store contains the list of individual email accounts and the
email messages for those accounts - both inbound and outbound mail.
Public Stores hold email that is not associated with any individual and
Public Stores hold the data that is shared across your Exchange users.
Note - If Outlook was configured to store users' email in LOCAL .PST files,
their email MAY NOT exist at the Exchange Private Store; in this case, you
need to focus your efforts on restoring the LOCAL .PST on that particular
Backup Client. For example, in Outlook, Personal Folders are usually stored
LOCALLY, at the Client computer, inside a .PST file. But, email that is
stored under your Active Directory Account Name is stored at the Exchange
Server.
In our example, we want to restore a message from a Private Store that a
user deleted from their Outlook email client. They deleted this email
message on July 16th, so we are going to use the backup data from July 15th
to "pull the email from." Note, we can do this because their Exchange
Server is configured to store Private email at the server.
The list of backup dates is limited to the number
of revisions you have set in the Tools -> Preferences -> Revisions.
BFW needs to create a temporary copy of the mailbox store that you have
selected. You will need enough free disk space at the Exchange Server to
hold the temporary copy of the mailbox store you have selected, so BFW
can display it's contents and extract email messages. Once you have selected
a location for your temporary working copy of the Exchange data, press the
"Create Temporary Exchange Database Now" button.
Backup for Workgroups pulls a copy of the mailbox store that you
selected from the Backup Server and constructs a temporary, working copy of
this mailbox store at the location you had specified above. Typically, BFW needs
several minutes to construct the temporary working copy of the Exchange
mailbox store. The larger the mailbox store, the more time needed,
so give this a few minutes to complete. Generally this process will
take about 2 minutes per GB of Exchange data.
The restore process reads the backup copy of your mailboxes and
displays the contents of the user accounts / folders and messages. You can
see the Folders on the left, and the messages within the highlighted
folder, on the right.
If you
choose to restore email from a private message store, the list of Mailbox
Accounts is displayed. In our example, the Mailbox Name shows us that
we are looking at Karl Forster's email. If you want to look at a
different email user account, use the drop-list to select another
account/user. If you choose to restore email from a public
store, the list of public folders is displayed on the left. Since public
folders are not associated with accounts, the account name list is not
displayed. Use the dialog on the right-hand side to select the
messages that you need to restore. In our example below, we are going to restore
2 email messages, as indicated by the checkmarks.
Once you have selected the email messages you want to restore, you need
to tell Backup for Workgroups where to send the restored email. To do
so, press the button labeled "Specify Message Recipient" at the
bottom of the screen in the Step 3 section. You will be presented with
the Specify Message Recipient dialog.
Backup for Workgroups sends the restored email to a user's Inbox. Use
the Specify Message Recipient dialog to specify the name of the computer
running your Exchange Server. Normally you would send the
email to your Exchange Server, but in the event that your Exchange Server is
not operating normally, you can send the
restored email to another email server that supports the SMTP protocol.
The restored email will be sent to your Exchange Server using SMTP, so you will need
to provide login information to your Exchange Server for it to accept the
SMTP email. You need to specify an account that has administrative
rights or an account that is a member of the Exchange Servers group.
If your Exchange Server requires SSL/TLS, you can either use the SSL port which
is 465 or set the port to 25 and Backup for Workgroups will switch to SSL/TLS
automatically if the Exchange Server states that is what it requires.
And finally, specify an account that you want to send the restored
email to. This is the address of someone who wants to receive the
restored email.
Again, the restored email will appear in their Inbox and it will look like
new, unread email.
Press OK to save your changes.
After selecting the messages to restore and specifying who to send the
restored messages to, you are ready to start the restore process. Press the
Begin Restore button.
Backup for Workgroups will scan through the message store and find the
messages you have selected. Due to the method that Exchange uses to
store the messages in the message store, Backup for Workgroups has to
linearly scan through the messages to find them. As a result, the time
to perform the restore is based on how many messages are stored in the
message store. This may take several minutes to find the messages in
the message store. Please allow a few minutes for this process to run.
When the messages are restored, the progress screen will close.
The restored messages should appear in the inbox of the email address that
you specified.
Everyday, thousands of corporations, non-profits, and
Government agencies use Backup for Workgroups Backup Software to backup
their Windows Servers! You can too!
