By Drew Nicholson, dnicholson@OutlookExchange.com

This article serves as a Case Study of a consulting job I had a few weeks ago. All names are changed to protect the innocent, as well as myself.

The company was a small, 40-50 person company, with an NT4.0 network, and Exchange 5.5 SP3 running on a member server. The CIO had come in one day to discover all of his servers had been stolen. All he had left was an tape backup -- this backup included an online backup of the IS and DS, an offline backup of every exchgsrvr directory from the old server, and a bricklevel backup, all using BackupExec 8.0.

He had gone and bought some new Micron servers, rebuilt his domain controllers and restored the accounts. He had also taken his online Exchange backup and used a version of non-Exchange aware NTBackup to restore the exchgsrvr directories from backup to a location on the file server.

Finally, he had taken a 333mhz desktop and installed Exchange 5.5 SP3 on it, and basically recreated his company's setup -- recreating the mailboxes, and allowing people to connect to it through Outlook98.

That's when he called me.

He wanted me to take the backup files that had been restored off the tape drive and integrate them into his now existing Exchange environment. Then he wanted to install Exchange 5.5 on one of his nice new Micron Servers running Win2K (another part of the job was to convert his WinNT domain to Win2K native, but that's a different column) -- but he wasn't interested in using the ADC to synch his AD and Exchange.

Once I got the lay of the land, I sat down and thought about it. What was the best way to do this? His priority was in regaining the information from the backup -- the new system had only been running for a few days.

Essentially, I had three Exchange Servers to work with: