We had to restore our Exchange 2007 server from a backup of 24hours in the past. Now we no longer have the emails that were sent to the users during the time from the backup timestamp to the time the Exchange server mailboxes re-mounted. Can I retrieve and put the messages in the Replay folder to get them back into the server? Thanks

If you have the transaction logs and you chose to replay the logs when restoring, then it should have replayed up to the point of failure. How did you perform the restore?

It was 3am so I just opted for the "Exchange Server" full restore for the night before. Am I screwed? My message search shows a bunch of messages from throughout the day of the 28th. I was thinking my worst case was being able to export that report to allow the users to email the senders and have them resend the messages.

Are your users in cache mode? THose messages may still be there in the inbox. If you did a full restore and didnt choose the option to preserve the existing logs, you are probably out of luck unless you moved them before hand.

I did make a full emergency back up prior to the full restore.

I moved the log files to a new folder prior to the restore. Can I replay those log files to retrieve the missing messages? Feeling a lot of pressure to get a solid answer. Thanks

Log files should be in their normal location when the database is restarted; you cannot replay log files after the fact.

At the risk of losing emails currently in everyone's mailbox, I opted to generate an individual report stating the header info for each user. Now they have the option to contact the original sender and request a resend. Thanks for all the input. Lessons have been learned. All I can say is that using Microsoft Exchange Console to dismount a storage database does not always result in a clean state for the database.

Hi, To restore the database from Full Back, you should run hard recovery which make the database status to be changed as Clean Shutdown. Before mounting it, you can add others log to the tempory folder then relay them into the database. After that, that should make the email intact. Thanks Allen