Our company recently aquired another company, and I need to move all of the aquired company's Exchange 2003 data over to our Exchange 2007 environment. We don't have a VPN between our two networks, or any kind of AD trust relationship to do a mailbox move between the two Exchange environments. There are only about a dozen mailboxes on the aquired companies Exchange 2003 server, but they are all 4 to 7GB in size. They have a rather slow Internet connection anyway so moving that data over the network isn't feasable. My original plan was to use Exmerge to export the data from the Exchange 2003 server using a handful of passes to get parts of these large mailboxes exported to PST files on a removable hard drive. I could then ship the drive back to the office and import the PST files to new mailboxes created for these users on our Exchange 2007 servers with import-mailbox. This is working, but it's very tedious, and I'm running out of time. Is it possible to backup the Exchange 2003 information store and then restore it to a recovery storage group in a different Exchange Organization in a different domain? From there could I restore those mailboxes to mailboxes in my Exchange 2007 organization?

No, the RSG wont allow that: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824126 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998782(EXCHG.65).aspx How the Recovery Storage Group Links Back to the Original Database A Recovery Storage Group uses the following two Active Directory attributes to link a copy of the database with its original database: The msExchMailboxGUID attribute:The first test that a mailbox must pass before you can recover data from the mailbox by using a Recovery Storage Group is that the mailbox GUID must correspond to a user in Active Directory. The mailbox GUID is a unique value that distinguishes a mailbox from all others. The mailbox GUID is created in the mailbox store when the mailbox is created, and the value remains the same for the lifetime of the mailbox. The msExchMailboxGUID attribute uses the mailbox GUID value from the mailbox store. The msExchMailboxGUID attribute is set on the user who owns the mailbox when you link a mailbox to a user account in Active Directory. The Exmerge.exe tool uses the msExchMailboxGUID attribute to match the mailbox in the Recovery Storage Group with the original mailbox.When you delete a mailbox, mailbox attributes are removed from the user object in Active Directory that previously owned the mailbox. As a result, you cannot use a Recovery Storage Group to recover a deleted mailbox. The msExchOrigMDB attribute:The second test that a mailbox must pass before you can recover data from the mailbox by using a Recovery Storage Group is that the mailbox must exist in the original mailbox store where the Recovery Storage Group was created. The msExchOrigMDB attribute is set on each database object in the Recovery Storage Group and it specifies the distinguished name of the original database where the Recovery Storage Group was created. If you move the mailbox to a different mailbox store, you cannot use the Exmerge.exe tool to extract data from the mailbox. To resolve this issue, do one of the following: