Restoring public folder email from Exchange 2016 on-prem server

[rsberzerker]

Support ID: Case # 05002945

A user accidentally deleted an email from a public folder. Exchange 2016 on-prem (for public folders). I went to the last Exchange server backup (which completed without error) and attempted to do an item level restore (needed just the one email). I found the folder no problem, but it was empty. I know at the time it was not.

I checked 3 others and they were also empty in the restore, but not in the actual [live] public folders. In the live public folders, there are lots of emails in those folders. We have a separate archival system for emails on a completely separate server (mostly because Outlook's search function sucks) and I was able to copy the missing email from there and restore it, so it's not an emergency this time.

Can Veeam not handle restores of public folders? Is there a sub-folder limit (the engineers do go nuts with creating sub-folders)? Is there some special trick to doing email restores from public folders?

So far support wants to do a virtual lab and see if we can see the emails in the folders from a restore, but that won't work for 2 reasons:
1) User mailboxes are hybrid and there is not Outlook on the server, so I have no way to view the virtual lab Exchange server public folders.
2) We don't have the spare capacity on our hosts currently to run the virtual lab. We are trying to get a new host, but that is weeks away at the earliest, most rosy scenario. Even then, we still come back to issue #1.

[Gostev]

Since Veeam backs up the entire Exchange server image, literally all data is captured in the backup and normally there should not be any issues restoring anything that was physically present in the mailbox database at the time when the backup was taken. And I don't believe we have any known issues or limitations as it comes to public folders or their hierarchy specifically. So, this is definitely worth researching further - I hope our support engineers will be able to come up with some other method.

BTW, I don't fully understand what is the issue with installing Outlook on the Exchange server running in a virtual lab?

[Regnor]

I don't know of any problems regarding restoring public folder content, so here's my guess: Do you have multiple publicfolder mailboxes? And if sou, could you by any chance have looked in the wrong mailbox?

We have a separate archival system for emails on a completely separate server (mostly because Outlook's search function sucks) and I was able to copy the missing email from there and restore it, so it's not an emergency this time.

Does it copy the content from your mailboxes, or move it to your archive system and only leave links in the originating mailbox?

[rsberzerker]

I know this is old, but for anyone searching this in the future, Regnor was correct. There were multiple mailboxes assigned the public folders and I looked in the wrong one. The wrong ones will show the folders, but not the emails.

[Regnor]

Wow, thanks for coming back after this time and providing the solution
There's one primary hierarchy public folder mailbox which contains the writable structure of the public folders. All other mailboxes have a copy of the hierarchy. The content itself can be distributed over multiple mailboxes.