Veeam Enterprise: Recover mailbox to pst

[atmorell]

Hello,

I am surprised how difficult and cumbersome it is to restore an Exchange mailbox with Veeam. The whole process by first submitting the restore request and then booting up a virtual lab with DC's and Exchange servers is not every practical, as backups most of the time will reside on slow disks. I am looking for a simple way of opening the users mailbox and maybe save as pst file.. What is the simples way? I need something that the customers can do themselves.


Best regards
Asbjørn Morell

[Alexey D.]

Hello Asbjørn,

Thanks for your feedback. From your point of view, can you provide some details for your "ideal process" of restoring mailboxes?

Virtual Lab is needed to create an isolated area as nobody wants that powered-up (from backup) copies of Exchange / DC would communicate with production VMs and make unnecessary changes. That's why fenced-off environment is a good way to be protected.

Submitting requests is for security reasons as nobody wants uncontrolled access to Exchange server to fetch private mailbox data.

Also, for me it looks like a good option if user can restore emails directly to his mailbox on production server, with no intermediate steps. However if you still want to save emails to file system, it can also be done in .eml format, the wizard supports it.

Does it make sense to you?

[tsightler]

I'd suggest investing in a copy of Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange. It's quite inexpensive and about a million times easier and more functional than the Veeam built in capability, yet still works great with Veeam. Simply start a Veeam "file level restore" of your Exchange server, and, once the Veeam Backup Browser window pops up, just minimize it, open QRM, and point it at your "edb" files and begin discovery/recovery operations.

[atmorell]

Alexey:
Well the only thing I need is the ability to export a user mailbox to a pst file. I was trying out the restore wizard but ended up with a lot of folders and eml files. Can it do a full restore of the entire mailbox to the local filesystem (pst file) on the backup server?

tsightler:
We are trying to replace as much as possible with Veeam and I was hoping to avoid another product for the Exchange restore process. It would be nice to just select the mailbox from the file level restore manger and save as a pst file though.

[Alexey D.]

Asbjørn, I see your requirement... As of now, only .eml files are supported, but I will consider your feedback as feature request, will discuss with developers. Thanks for sharing.

[Gostev]

I am surprised how difficult and cumbersome it is to restore an Exchange mailbox with Veeam. The whole process by first submitting the restore request and then booting up a virtual lab with DC's and Exchange servers is not every practical, as backups most of the time will reside on slow disks. I am looking for a simple way of opening the users mailbox and maybe save as pst file.. What is the simples way? I need something that the customers can do themselves.

Hi Asbjørn, one part of this process that is optional is virtual lab request system. You can proceed straight to recovery without having to file a request. This is explained in sticky FAQ in more details.

However, if you want your customers to do this, then this is exactly what this request system was designed for in the first place - to provide them with ability to do this without granting access to actual backup files. In fact, with every other tool, you would have to give them access to actual backup files.

If you can point specifically what parts of the restore process are most "cumbersome" (except restore lab requests which are optional), we will certainly look into simplifying those parts.

as backups most of the time will reside on slow disks

Keep in mind that this will affect every Exchange recovery tool, as all of them need to scan through mailbox database files. For example, the above mentioned Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange will be equally affected if your backup storage is very slow.

I am looking for a simple way of opening the users mailbox and maybe save as pst file.

What Exchange version are you using?

Thanks.

[tsightler]

as backups most of the time will reside on slow disks

Keep in mind that this will affect every Exchange recovery tool, as all of them need to scan through mailbox database files. For example, the above mentioned Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange will be equally affected if your backup storage is very slow.

This may be true, but we've found Quest Recovery Manager to be about 100x faster than Veeam when attempting to export a large amount of mail, and it's capabilities are more what are required for legal discovery and other issues. We can generally be in and out of QRM before Veeam manages to get a DC restored in the virtual lab. There's something to be said for a tool that works without requiring all of the associated pluming of AD and virtual labs, etc.

[Gostev]

Fair enough, QRME might be a better choice for admin-driven restores, especially from perspective of legal discovery.

Our concept is just different, it is designed around self-user restores without giving the end users physical access to backup file. You are also correct saying it may take a few minutes for virtual lab to be prepared. However, from how we see our capabilities being deployed and used, we do not expect every new user to trigger new virtual lab creation, and then wait until it boots up. Since over 98% of recoveries are performed from the latest backup, we expect that corresponding labs for most commonly required application groups will be set up to be start automatically after each backup (by scheduled SureBackup job), and remain running until next backup automatically shuts them down. This makes the virtual labs readily available for end users, enabling them to proceed straight to recovery.

In all cases, our application item recovery functionality is really version 1.0 at this time, and we do realize it may take improvements. Which is exactly why I am asking OP to provide more thoughts about how we can make it better

[Bunce]

I'd say about 2% of recoveries would be from the latest backup, since recent losses are handled by buit-in deleted item retention in Exchange (default 7 days).

So I'd only need a Veeam restore if it was older than that or in times of DR (which is not handled by the end user anyway..)

[tsightler]

Our concept is just different, it is designed around self-user restores without giving the end users physical access to backup file. You are also correct saying it may take a few minutes for virtual lab to be prepared. However, from how we see our capabilities being deployed and used, we do not expect every new user to trigger new virtual lab creation, and then wait until it boots up. Since over 98% of recoveries are performed from the latest backup, we expect that corresponding labs for most commonly required application groups will be set up to be start automatically after each backup (by scheduled SureBackup job), and remain running until next backup automatically shuts them down. This makes the virtual labs readily available for end users, enabling them to proceed straight to recovery.

Understood, I wasn't really criticizing, but I thought the user was asking for "fast/simple" and the Veeam tool is not that. The honest truth is, we don't really need/use this functionality anyway since we leverage our archive server for this purpose and it already has search, legal holds, and export to PST, and can perform "user directed restore" of lost items.

To be totally honest, the whole "end user restore" stuff in Veeam is just not that useful to us and certainly not worth leaving 3-4 (or more) VM's running every day all day using resources for the handful of times it would ever be needed. Filesystem based snapshots provide 10 days of user based file recoveries, our Exchange is configured to provide 30 days of "deleted item retention" and the email archive system provide simple web and mobile access to users email for 7 years, with easy item restore for users. Still, I understand where the tool might be usable for plenty of others, just doesn't happen to be that great for us.

[sandro19]

Hello,

I am surprised how difficult and cumbersome it is to restore an Exchange mailbox with Veeam. The whole process by first submitting the restore request and then booting up a virtual lab with DC's and Exchange servers is not every practical, as backups most of the time will reside on slow disks. I am looking for a simple way of opening the users mailbox and maybe save as pst file.. What is the simples way? I need something that the customers can do themselves.


Best regards
Asbjørn Morell

For this situation you may use pst converter. It is able to help with big corrupted or deleted pst files. Works under all Windows OS, uses modern methods of recovering.

[jbullock]

I'd suggest investing in a copy of Quest Recovery Manager for Exchange. It's quite inexpensive and about a million times easier and more functional than the Veeam built in capability, yet still works great with Veeam. Simply start a Veeam "file level restore" of your Exchange server, and, once the Veeam Backup Browser window pops up, just minimize it, open QRM, and point it at your "edb" files and begin discovery/recovery operations.

I am having the same issue as the OP where I need to extract an entire inbox to a PST for legal reasons. How can I point something at the backup of the exchange server with the Backup Browser open? Is it being mounted somewhere? I know this is an old thread but I am unable to send private messages and have not found anymore information.

[foggy]

Jason, in v6 the restored VM volumes are mounted under %AppData%\Local\Temp\random.xyz (separate folder for each volume). Thanks.

[DonFirst]

From my point of view granular restore is the weakest point of veeam / excluding file restore - this feature is really useful/
What I expected is process without vitual lab/I'm talking only about granular restore / I like one click restore for exchange,acive directory ,sql and sharepoint .
At the moment to granula backup and restore I'm using ARC SERVE Backup soulution.
Regards