Exchange - Move mailbox nightmare!

LizardKing · 2 Dec 2010 at 12:03

Can any one help!

Were in the process of moving from Exchange 2003 to 2010, and at the moving mailbox stage, all this had gone well untill i came in this morning to two users that have lost all there emails from before the move, exchange sees there mailbox's as 0.5mb each so i know there not hiding in there.
Also another user is now missing all there contacts/calender and todo list but there emails are all present :confused:

As the copy went without any errors exchange has since removed the 2003 copy.
We have a backup of the datastore in its entirety but not a grt style backup.
Is there any way we can mount the datastore and recover items out of it?

oddjob62 · 2 Dec 2010 at 12:41

Been a LONG time since i did it in 2003 but you can use recovery storage groups to mount a database. Then you can use exmerge to extract the mailbox you require to a PST and re-import it to the new database. Plenty of documentation about it.

LizardKing · 2 Dec 2010 at 14:45

oddjob62 said:
Been a LONG time since i did it in 2003 but you can use recovery storage groups to mount a database. Then you can use exmerge to extract the mailbox you require to a PST and re-import it to the new database. Plenty of documentation about it.

Thanks - i'll look into that, I'm not usually an exchange admin so god knows how i've fallen into doing this. :rolleyes:

Xelene · 7 Dec 2010 at 22:47

There's some tools in the console to dump mailboxes into PST files for 2003; but they are a pain in the arse as you need to install the Exchange tools on a 32 bit machine AND a copy of Outlook to run them.

I kept a spare XP machine around for it.

It won't recover lost data tho.

SiriusB · 7 Dec 2010 at 22:55

Exmerge doesn't need Outlook at all. Just download it from MS, dump it in the Exchsvr\Bin folder and run it.

Been using it a lot recently as I was archiving some old mailboxes to PST before getting rid of the mailboxes from the store.

Xelene · 7 Dec 2010 at 23:02

SiriusB said:
Exmerge doesn't need Outlook at all. Just download it from MS, dump it in the Exchsvr\Bin folder and run it.

Been using it a lot recently as I was archiving some old mailboxes to PST before getting rid of the mailboxes from the store.

Does it run against 2003? Maybe i'm misremembering and it got discontinued against 2007...

SiriusB · 7 Dec 2010 at 23:29

Yup, runs fine.

HungryHippos · 8 Dec 2010 at 00:19

sldsmkd said:
Does it run against 2003? Maybe i'm misremembering and it got discontinued against 2007...

You need a server running x86 and a copy of Outlook to use the Exchange Export-Mailbox cmdlet that comes with Exchange 2007 and PowerShell. For 2003 as said Exmerge is the best tool for the job!

As a side note I recovered a database into an RSG in Exchange 2007 the other week, and to restore a mailbox from this RSG to PST I had to extract the content to another mailbox, then run Export-Mailbox against that for it to work.

Wish there was an easier way without 3rd party tools

In Exchange 2003 you can simply mount an RSG, then extract to PST using ExMerge from that.

LizardKing · 8 Dec 2010 at 15:07

Eulogy said:
Wish there was an easier way without 3rd party tools

In Exchange 2003 you can simply mount an RSG, then extract to PST using ExMerge from that.

It does seem strange why they would do away with exmerge, it was a fantastic tool!

oddjob62 · 8 Dec 2010 at 17:35

LizardKing said:
It does seem strange why they would do away with exmerge, it was a fantastic tool!

It can be done with powershell now. You can restore a mailbox from a RSG direct to a regular Storage group.

#Chri5# · 8 Dec 2010 at 20:42

LizardKing said:
It does seem strange why they would do away with exmerge, it was a fantastic tool!

Semi-fantastic... no support for unicode PSTs so you could only dump 2GB into a PST at once :rolleyes:

HungryHippos · 13 Dec 2010 at 08:01

oddjob62 said:
It can be done with powershell now. You can restore a mailbox from a RSG direct to a regular Storage group.

My point was though, that in Exchange 2003 you could go directly from the RSG to a PST file.

Now to restore to a PST in Exchange 2007 you have to restore the RSG content to a mailbox first, then export that to a PST file using PowerShell (and you need a server running 32 bit and Outlook for this to work as well).

I've not had to use an RSG for restoring a database directly yet, but do occasionally need to restore deleted mailboxes/mailbox content from backups.

#Chri5# said:
Semi-fantastic... no support for unicode PSTs so you could only dump 2GB into a PST at once

Agreed the PST file sizes are a bit limited in Exmerge, but otherwise it was very good.

We have a mixed evironment of Exchange 03 and Exchange 07 so if i need to extract large Exchange 03 mailboxes I simply use PowerShell to do it anyway.