Restoring Microsoft Exchange 2000 to an alternate location


Your Exchange 2000 Email server is always at risk for failure no matter the level of protection on your network or how stable your hardware may be. It is best to have a prepared plan to which you may resort if your company’s Exchange 2000 server is suddenly deemed inoperable. Some familiarity of Active Directory and the general understanding of how Exchange 2000 servers operate is recommended to safely recover your Exchange 2000 Database(s). 

Using the UltraBac Exchange Agent, it is possible to restore the Mailbox and Public Folder Store of one Exchange 2000 machine to a different Exchange 2000 machine on the network. In order to restore to a remote location, there must be an instance of Exchange 2000 running on the network containing a Storage Group, Mailbox Store, and Public Folder Store with the same name as the source Exchange 2000 server.

The restoration of Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 is quite different. The remote restoration of Exchange 5.5 required another Exchange 5.5 server on the network with the same Site and Organization name as the original server on which the original backup was performed. When the restore was complete, there were a few more steps involved with configuring “consistency adjustment” within Exchange Administrator so that users may once again mount their mailboxes. Exchange 2000 is intricately tied in with Windows 2000 Active directory, which makes the restore procedure quite different. After the restore to the alternate machine has been completed, the Mailboxes must be “Reconnected” to their users in Active Directory. This process will be discussed later.

Restore

Load the index of an Exchange 2000 backup by selecting the appropriate storage device, then click “File”/”Load Index for Restore”. Choose the Exchange 2000 backup and click Next. You may select the entire Storage Group, or if you would like to restore only the Mailbox Store, expand the storage group and select the Mailbox Store you wish to restore. Make sure you select the Log Files as well or UltraBac will not be able to remount the Mailbox Store after the restore has completed. Click “Operations”/”Restore Selected Files”.

Select the Exchange 2000 Options button on the General Restore Options dialog box.



Check the “Restore to Alternate Server” checkbox, and type the server name of the Exchange 2000 machine or browse to it using the Browse button. Do not check the "Alternate Temporary Log File Directory" box unless first consulting with UltraBac Technical Support.  UltraBac will know the location to which it should restore the log files.  Click the Unattended checkbox if you’d like to suppress any pop-up messages that may occur during the restore and click Restore.

Once the restore is finished, the mailboxes will have to be reconnected from within Active Directory to their associated mailboxes on the Exchange 2000 server. To successfully reconnect a mailbox, it cannot already have an associated mailbox to any Exchange 2000 server on the network. This is a bit confusing, but the example below will help in understanding the procedure.

Let’s say we’ve just restored a Mailbox Store to a different machine and we’re reconnecting the “Administrator” mailbox to the newly restored Exchange 2000 Server. After the restore is complete and the Mailbox Store has been mounted, right click on the Mailbox Store through Exchange System Manager and click “Run Cleanup Agent.” Now the Mailboxes should appear in the Mailboxes pane on the right side of the Exchange System Manager, with red X’s beside them.



According to Active Directory, all of these newly restored mailboxes still have an association with the original Exchange 2000 machine. Using the Administrator mailbox as an example, I’ll delete its mailbox through Active Directory so that I may reconnect to it through the newly restored Exchange 2000 server. I’m able to perform this task by accessing Users and Computers, right clicking on the user, clicking Exchange Tasks, and deleting the mailbox through the Exchange Task Wizard. 

NOTE: The Active Directory machine on which the mailbox has been deleted must replicate this change to other Active Directory machines on the network. Depending on the speed by which Active Directory is setup to replicate, this simple change may take some time, and possibly cause a delay in reconnecting the mailbox, outlined in the subsequent step.

After deleting the mailbox through Active Directory, I can then go into Exchange System Manager and reconnect the mailbox I just deleted to the newly restored Exchange Mailbox Store by right clicking on the mailbox and clicking “Reconnect”, as seen in the screenshot below.



Exchange will ask for the user account to which you’d like to reconnect the mailbox.



Click the mailbox you which you wish to re-connect and click OK.

If you are planning on re-connecting more than just a few mailboxes, consider the “Mailbox Reconnect” utility (or, MCCONN), offered with the Exchange 2000 CD, located in the Support sub-directory. 

The utility works by first running the Cleanup Agent through Exchange 2000 System Manager, then displaying all orphaned mailboxes in the form of a list through MBCONN.exe. The list is shown by executing MBCONN.exe, typing the Exchange 2000 server to which you’d like to import the list of users, and typing the name of the catalog domain controller. The Actions menu in the toolbar will allow you to create a list of users by clicking Export Users. This file will be saved on your hard drive in the form of an “ldf” file and can be executed through the command line. An example of the command to be used to import this list into Active Directory on the Target exchange server is as follows:

Ldifde –i –f export.ldf –s SERVERNAME

Note: The import function of the ldf file may take some time, depending on the size of the task. Also, the user running the ldifde command may not posses the required user attributes necessary to complete the import—“objectclass and samAccountName are required, but more user attributed may be added as needed.

More information regarding instructions on how to import a list of users to the newly restore Exchange 2000 server using “LDIF” can be found here:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q237677&