Restore Primary Mailbox into In-Place Archive

[tcpeckman]

Is it possible to restore a user's primary mailbox directly into another user's In-Place Archive (Online Archive)? Sometimes we need to recover a primary mailbox in order to have another user have access to project related emails for archival purposes. I know that I can use the "Restore to" feature to restore the mailbox to a subfolder of another mailbox and then have them manually move it into their Online Archive but I wanted to see if I could do it directly.

[Mike Resseler]

Hey Troy,

That is not possible I'm afraid. You will need to restore it to the mailbox as we cannot restore directly to the archive.

[tsanfilipp]

And vice versa, it seems. We had backed up the online archive of a specific user and then tried to restore folders out of that backup into the inbox of a different user, but it defaulted to the online archive of that user. Seems like a limitation that you can only restore to the same type of location as the original backup.

[Mike Resseler]

Tim,

Someone of R&D is performing some specific tests at this moment. As far as I know, the issue is not with the restore itself. That is (for us at least) just another folder so that works. However, the internal mechanisms of Microsoft Online Exchange will recognize the items and will consider this marked for archiving (or something like that, again, they are investigating to see what exactly happens).

[Polina]

So, here's an update from our QC team:
Neither of the above scenarios is supported (for reasons described in Mike's post above). Restore is only possible within the same scope, i.e. archive mailbox to archive mailbox, and primary mailbox to primary mailbox.

[petewesty]

Very disappointed to read this limitation of Veeam.
I can send you countless articles of why people need to restore Archive data into Primary Mailboxes when on Office365.
Especially when you want to gain back the Office365 license and convert the mailbox to shared (which doesn't support archives). You need to migrate the Archive data back into the Primary. (reverse to the title of this thread).

I COULD have done this with veeam but your 365 Exchange Explorer Restore function has a powershell backend instruction stating something like 'If Archive use' use -TargetIsArchive, simply create an option in the restore GUI allowing users to trigger this parameter on or off will resolve this problem..
Since you product doesn't support this I will need to do it manually via powershell and .psts which takes forever.

[Mike Resseler]

Pete,

We will look into it for further versions, but as you read above, it is not that simple and there are differences in an archived email and a primary mailbox. We would need to figure out how to "convert" an archived email to a primary again

[Rouchesta]

Any news about this functionality asked in the previous messages ?
I'm currently facing a problem with Exchange Online. I accidentally archived 1 DAY old mails on user's mailboxes.
With this kind of option it should be possible to restore from in-place archive to active mailboxes.

[Polina]

Hi Gaëtan,

This limitation is still present. Please use the workaround suggested in the above posts.

[pesos]

Hi all,

Assume answer is no from what I've seen in the software, but just wondering if there is some way to do a restore of an archive mailbox with a target being a primary mailbox (and/or vice versa). In this case the use case is to reintegrate a number of archive mailboxes into the primary mailbox so the archive can be done away with. But it would also be very useful to be able to restore a primary mailbox into another user's archive mailbox (for historical purposes before the user is deleted).

Thanks!

[Polina]

Hi John,

I moved your post to the existing discussion on the same topic. Restoring an archive to a primary is not supported, but you can follow the workaround suggested above.

[pesos]

Hi Polina, sorry but I'm not seeing the workaround veeam has provided above?

[nielsengelen]

Only option is export to PST and leverage the PST file.