Need help restoring mail with Backup Exec 11d

Crashed server, corrupted AD/Exchange. Tried repairs, etc, to no avail.
Put new production server in place, recreated network, all is working fine.
Now I want to give the users their old emails and contacts (that existed in
old network). I have some tapes with recent Backup Exec 11d backups of the
Information Store. I am not experienced with BE restore. I do not do
backups the way BE seems to have been used in this case. There is no system
state, and there is no offline copy of the BDBDATA folder or individual priv
and pub files. So I have no obvious way to do a swing migration or
forklift.

I was not part of the picture prior to the crash, came in the day of. So I
don't have the advantage of hindsight or the larger picture. What I have
are tapes containing backups of the Information Store, which appear to be an
"exchange-aware" BE-specific process. Once I catalog the tapes on a
temporary server (SBS 2003 built/configured as close as possible to crashed
server), the Information Store backup is visible and looks very complete and
detailed. All users are there and I can drill down to brick-level and see
the individual emails, complete with name and size.

But after reading through much documentation, I cannot get the restore
right. I've messed up two clean SBS installations trying to restore. The
restore seems to happen, but in ESM there occur duplicated mailboxes of the
same alias, but evidently being seen as different users. To my confusion,
if I try to run Exmerge against the restored IS, Exmerge will pull up a list
of users and show the large mailbox size, like it's looking at the mailboxes
I want to convert to pst. But when it runs the process it produces a very
small file (40kb), so I know it's not the mailboxes restored by BE.

Perhaps I'm just too inexperienced with BE, but I cannot figure out how to
prepare the interim server for the restore and how to set the options for
the restore. Do I create AD and mailboxes just like normal and restore to
that? Will this even work on a new server and not create trust problems?
Do I have to manually move, delete or otherwise decided what to do with the
log files? I've tried the "Guide Me" wizards and answered every different
option that seems reasonable, but yet the restore just doesn't seem to
happen right.

I have another clean, updated, and patched SBS installation, but I'm afraid
to try another restore, because I so badly don't want to mess it up. All I
want are those old emails and contacts, which BE actually shows me in the
cataloged listing, but I can't reach out and grab them!

Advice greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

JM

On Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:04:48 -0600, JM wrote:

> Crashed server, corrupted AD/Exchange

I think it's worth calling Symantec. I use them for my backup with the
EXCEPTION of Exchange. They seem to complicate a simple issue.



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:-)