Recover a deleted Exchange 2007 mailbox when the AD user has been deleted as well

I had a challenge this week.  I never played with Exchange's  Recovery Storage Groups (RSG) and I had to restore an Exchange mailbox that has been deleted.  The user left the organization a while ago and I don't know why, I couldn't find the .pst that we usually create before deleting the user and mailbox.

We use EMC Networker for our backups, but it cannot restore a mailbox if the mailbox has been deleted.  The answer from EMC: The user has to restore the information store (IS) to the RSG and from there, contact Microsoft to find how to export the mailbox out of the RSG.

Of course, I didn't contact Microsoft, but I found that:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795895.aspx

So here is what I did:

  • Following the EMC Networker module for exchange admin guide
    • Created the RSG in Exchange Management Shell (EMS)
    • Created the Mailbox Database in the RSG (in EMS
    • Restore the Mailbox Database using Networker (which restores it to the RSG)
Then, I just used this command (taken from the link above):

Restore-Mailbox -RSGMailbox 'John' -RSGDatabase 'RSG\DB11' -id 'Simon' -TargetFolder 'John E-mail'

That assumes that the mailbox to recover is "John", the RSG database is named DB11 and the RSG is called RSG.  It will restore the contents of John's mailbos to a folder called "John E-mail" in Simon's mailbox.

Unless you have spare space to keep the RSG, remove the DB and RSG http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125197%28v=exchg.80%29.aspx

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