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When Exchange crashes, an otherwise normal day can quickly turn into one of the worst days of your life. It can take several hours to bring an Exchange server back online, and it never fails that some busybody from management wants to check up on you or threaten you every five minutes.
Prior to Exchange Server 2003, this was simply par for the course. There was no high-speed Exchange disaster recovery technique. But with Exchange 2003, you can perform a partial recovery using the Dial Tone Method, so that users can continue to send and receive mail while you are restoring the old messages.
There will be a couple of times during this recovery process when users will momentarily lose Exchange connectivity, but they will be interrupted far less than if they had to wait around all day for a restore from backup tape.
If your Exchange server is completely destroyed during some catastrophe, but the rest of your network is functional, here's how you can implement this recovery technique.
Step 1: Bring a new Exchange server online and restore mailboxes
Step 2: Merge and restore the information stores
So far, you have managed to bring a new Exchange server online and create mailboxes for each of your users. Assuming that the new server is properly configured, users should now be able to send and receive mail. The trick now is to merge the old server's information store with the new server's information store. You accomplish this task using a Recovery Storage Group.
Step 3: Swap databases and merge the data
Now you have the old versions of the mailboxes in the Recovery Storage Group -- but you also have the temporary mailboxes in the Exchange information store that users have been using to send and receive mail for the last few hours. You could just merge the mailboxes together and be done with it, but there are a
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couple of problems with this approach. First, if you have a big information store, the merge could take a long time. Second, merging the two information stores will cause problems with rules and OST files. A better solution is to swap Exchange databases and then merge the data.
Step 4: Recover the mailboxes
The last step in the process is to recover the mailboxes. Before you do though, you must make sure that your Exchange server is running Exchange 2003 Service Pack 1. Otherwise, this technique will not work. If you can't install Service Pack 1 for some reason, then the workaround is to use ExMerge.
About the author: Brien M. Posey, MCSE, is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for his work with Windows 2000 Server and IIS. Brien has served as CIO for a nationwide chain of hospitals and was once in charge of IT security for Fort Knox. As a freelance technical writer he has written for Microsoft, CNET, ZDNet, TechTarget, MSD2D, Relevant Technologies and other technology companies. You can visit Brien's personal Web site at http://www.brienposey.com.
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This procedure sounds nice if you have another Exchange server that you can start up from scratch. But for those of us that only have one Exchange server and Windows Small Business Server 2003, this simply is not an option.
Additionally, if you want to use the ExMerge utility, you have to give the Installable File System (IFS) mapping for the drive a letter and change the default permissions for each user's folder -- and that takes additional time for the permissions to propagate.
—David M.
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