exchange Itel Level recovery MS support

[BackupKing1]

Veeam folks,

Does Microsoft support the item level recovery support for exchange , I remember I heard that MS doesn't support any product/ vendor that does the exchange restore Item Level recovery , as it could cause exchange DB corruption.
Thanks
King King

[foggy]

Not sure I understand the reasoning behind this. Do you probably have any links to share?

[BackupKing1]

I need to know if it is supported by MSFT exchange team, SO in case of issues do to the ITL ,and MSFT cant help , I will be prepared
Thanks
King

[veremin]

We have had utility for granular MS exchange item restoration for years now. And have not heard anything about it being unsupported by Microsoft neither from our users, nor from MS itself. So, it would be appreciated if you provide links where MS states that it doesn't support any product/ vendor that does the exchange restore Item Level recovery. Thanks.

[dellock6]

Also because, thinking about the process, the restore itself ivolves only the Exchange EDB database. Once the database is "restored" from a backup (actually is simply mounted from the backup, not restored in original location) the tool browse the database to identify the single items you need to restore. The only way for microsoft to not support the Exchange Explorer would be to unsupport the entire database restore capability.

[Gostev]

Yes, I remember something like this from my previous life. There were no supported APIs for Exchange database interaction, and ISVs have to "hack" one. Incorrect usage of internal undocumented APIs could indeed corrupt the database, and Microsoft support did not want to deal with the consequences, thus the statement. In fact, I was working for a vendor doing those "unsupported" restores very successfully and we struggled from this statement a lot. But, all of this was well over 10 years ago.

Since then, Microsoft has documented and published jet database access API to let ISV drill into the mailbox database legitimately, as well as introduced Exchange web services for safe mailbox population with the restored items that does not require low level jet database interactions. These are the APIs used Veeam Explorer for Exchange, so you are definitely safe with Veeam.

Note that this may not be the case with other vendors leveraging legacy solutions for granular Exchange recovery built many years ago, as likely those are based on old approaches. Keep in mind that unlike those solutions, Veeam Explorer for Exchange was built from ground up just 2 years ago. One of the reasons we do not support Exchange 2007 for example, is because it lacks some of those "legal" APIs I am talking about.