Recently, a user informed me that hundreds of items were missing from the Calendar of an Exchange Server 5.5 mailbox. The mailbox's Information Store (IS) was configured to retain deleted items, but I couldn't find any deleted items to recover. The items didn't appear to be in any offline folders store (.ost) or personal folder store (.pst) files, and the users who had access to the mailbox were sure they hadn't moved the items. Eventually, I discovered that someone had performed a hard delete of the missing Calendar items, which weren't recoverable because Deleted Items Recovery had been enabled only for the Deleted Items folder. (See the Microsoft article "XADM: How to Recover Items That Are Not First Transferred to the Deleted Items Folder" at http:// support.microsoft.com/?kbid=178630 for a discussion of this type of situation.) Consequently, I needed to restore the deleted items from backup.
Our Exchange application runs on a Windows 2000 Server machine with a tape backup drive, and I use VERITAS Software's Backup Exec 8.6 with the Agent for Microsoft Exchange to perform online backups of Exchange to tape. I recently had set up a Windows NT Server test server that I could use as a recovery server but didn't want to rebuild it as a Win2K Server machine (I planned to use it as a hot spare while I rebuilt another NT server); furthermore, it didn't have a tape drive. So I decided to determine whether I could restore the IS over the network to the recovery server—even though that server was running a different OS version and service pack from the Exchange production server—without bringing down the production server. I discovered that such a restoration, although it contradicts the Exchange 5.5 disaster-recovery information I've read, is indeed possible. . . .
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