We use daily Exchange backups to provide for “recovery from system failures” and “disaster recovery”. This question is about a different scenario. Like this... Late on a Friday a business person accidently deletes 50 contacts from their Outlook / Exchange Contacts folder. They do not notice the error. Vacation next week, busy the following week, ...and so on. Therefore, by the time the business person realizes the 50 items are missing, the oldest “Exchange recovery backup tape” does not have the missing items. The backup tapes that were taken before that Friday had the 50 items. But the backup tapes are only kept for a couple of weeks. Because the intended use is for “system recovery”, and we do plan to use the “very recent data” for that type of situation. Does your organization provide backups of Exchange mailbox data that you keep for a long time ? For example, do you keep a FULL backup on the 15^th of each month and then keep 12 months of those tapes ? (Just an example.) And how do you do those backups and recovery work ? (Currently Exchange 2007, Outlook 2007, OWA) Thanks ======

You can use a recovery storage group to recover older databases and export data assuming you had the tape, but in your initial scenario there's no tape so you're SOL. In some scenarios you may have databases which are older than the current server version, in which case restoring into production can be problematic... there you might either restore to a lab/test environment or use a 3rd party tool to parse the database without mounting it. Increasing deleted items retention in the first scenario to something like 30 days (which isn't unreasonable for most orgs) would like have addressed that issue for the end user, but at some point companies purge old data, whatever the source and the answer to how do you recover data from that time frame becomes.. you don't.

If you are interested in using a 3rd party utility to extract the exact granular information needed from a EDB backup check out Lucid8's DigiScope http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.aspTroy Werelius www.Lucid8.com

Hi, The retention depends on the actual situation of different companies. For some very important emails, they will keep longer. I recommend you to follow these steps: archive emails, save them into storage server or other hard disk and then hold them into disks or CDs regularly. For more about backup and restore, please refer to the article Database Backup and Restore. Hope it helps. ThanksPlease remember to click Mark as Answer on the post that helps you, and to click Unmark as Answer if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

Thanks for the various comments. My question was not really about tools, recovery group, and so on. But your comments about “30 days for Recover Deleted Items”, is closer to the topic I was asking about. I also happened to see this article ( http://thoughtsofanidlemind.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/the-changing-need-for-backups/ ) from Tony Redmond. He also mentions 30 days for SIR. (I assume SIR is the same as “recover deleted items” in E2007.) It seems to me that it would be possible that a business person could go for more than 30 days before they realized something was missing due to accidental deletion. For example, if they have monthly or yearly processes, they might not use that “old email” for many days after the accidental deletion (or accidental change). What I hear you saying is that many/most Exchange systems simply do not provide for that type of recovery. I also expected to hear some mention of “email archive” as part of the solution. If you have a separate email archive system that copies data from Exchange into the other system, then you have a copy of those items frozen in time. (Or similar function in E2010 retention policy.) If the business person has access to the email archive, they could find the missing items in the archive and copy them back to their Exchange mailbox. By the way, I am including Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks in this discussion. (not just “email messages”.). Thanks for your help. ======

Well it really comes down to your business needs and perhaps a combination of solutions will help you meet your needs. You can certainly set your deleted item retention to wider time frame if desired, however, invariably there will be someone that has something missing outside of the retention window and then the question is, how will you recover this? One way is to recover the database from your backup solution to a Recovery Storage Group so that you can then recovered the required items via the tools available with MS or to use a 3rd party solution like Lucid8's DigiScope http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp But again it all depends upon your backup retention as well, i.e. are you really saving a years worth of email backups? You could also explore a backup application that does a mailbox level backup OR has the ability to recover granular items from the regular exchange backup, however, be careful when selecting such a vendor because many of them have special requirements, like Symantec's BE, they say they can give you granular recover, but they neglect to mention that you must make a special GRT backup and that there are limitations with it as well Another way is to implement an email archiving system, however you really need to discuss the corporate goals on this since recovery of items is not in and of itself THE major business drive to implement an archiving system. But realize with an archiving system it may not meet your corporate goals to keep everything forever because of storage and legal reasons, but again thats a discussion you need to have with the appropriate business heads. Tony is a great guy and fantastic writer and the mention of SIR is the Single Item Recovery within Exchange 2010 which has changed drastically from previous versions of Exchange and here is a good article to get you started http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee364755.aspx There is talk of course about the 2010 DAGs and that organizations can consider not doing backups, which IMO is a recipe for disaster. True 2010 is much more resilient then it was in the past, however not doing backups is just asking to be slapped down. Now that said I do think having a backup member inside of the DAG is fantastic because then you can backup all the DB's without impacting the active servers. Troy Werelius www.Lucid8.com

Heh.. I work for an archive vendor so I guess I could have mentioned it. In general though restore from archive is sub-optimal if the issue is widespread. In the singular use case scenario it would be effective. You could also do periodic exports to PST. At some point though it comes down to cost. If the only reason one were thinking of implementing an archive was to protect against this type of scenario I'd question the investment vs. value numbers using to justify it. If there were other factors which supported archiving and this was a side benefit, then absolutely.