Hello,

Background
We're using Backup Exec 12.5. Recently, we upgraded from Exchange 2003 to 2007 (new installation altogether), and as the laws of information technology state, "if it ain't broken, don't fix it". Now we need to recover a single mailbox with all of its contents from backup tapes, and the easiest way would be to restore to the original server. However, that server was part of a cluster which is not functioning anymore. Instead, we have a temporary Exchange server, but are unable to get it to work properly (mainly because of time limitations; we cannot test whether recovering works, wait an hour and a half for the information to be retrieved from backup tapes, and then repeat the retrieval process if the recovery was unsuccessful).

The big question
Microsoft gives good instructions (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/823176, method 3) on how to recover mailboxes from the actual Exchange database files by just mounting the files, but our backups were made using the Exchange agent. I know the recovery process includes staging of the entire database files, but the staging files are automatically deleted after a successful (or in this case, unsuccesful) recovery attempt. Can the temporary staging files be mounted directly on the Exchange server to recover mailboxes, and if so, can Backup Exec be configured so that it will not remove the files after the (unsuccessful) recovery process completes?

Regards,
Toni Palmgren