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Using Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Dial tone recovery feature - Part I
Part 2 is now posted here
Briefing
We will see step by step how to recover from a disaster using dial tone
database on an alternate mailbox server.
Introduction
Exchange Server 2007 has many ways to recover from a
disaster scenario and it takes advantage of the database portability where we
can easily move database between mailbox servers.
In this article we are going over to dial tone
process that consists in a database corruption or server failure which the
process to recover the server or database cannot be done in a reasonable time.
In this case, we can start an empty database to provide limited business
continuity for the affected users.
The entire process that we will be going over in
this article will be explained in three follow figures. First of all, our
current scenario has some users that are connected to their respective mailbox
in the Mailbox Server (Figure 01).
Figure 01: Active Directory users and their
respective mailboxes
After a hardware failure in the Mailbox Server 01,
we will move only the user configuration to a dial tone database located in the
Mailbox Server 02. The users moved to this new mailbox server will not have any
message on their folders. (Figure 02)
Figure 02: Moving the user’s configurations to the dial tone database
Then, we will follow these steps (Figure 03).
·
Recover the Mailbox Server 01 and its respective database from a
backup
·
Step 01: Move the database from Mailbox Server 02 to the Recovery
Storage Group on Mailbox Server 01
·
Step 02: Move the mailbox configuration to the old database
·
Step 03: Merge the information from the dial tone database (new
messages) with the current database (database with all messages before the
server failure)
Figure 03: Process to move the dial tone database from Mailbox Server 02 to
Mailbox Server 01 and merge that information
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