Exchange The Recovery Storage Group

You could have been in an exchange migration or maybe an exchange upgrade and now have to do a Exchange recovery. Or you could be running and exhange server and not have been maintaining the server. In any case you have a failed server and your people are looking to you to restore their mailboxes. The next paragraphs will help you restore your server. If you need further help please contact our office, we are located in Los Angeles, but can remote in to your server anywhere in the USA or Canada.

What is the Recovery Storage Group?

The Recovery Storage Group (RSG) is a new type of storage group in Exchange 2003 that essentially allows you to mount a copy of a mailbox store onto a production Exchange 2003 server. You can then recover data within the restored mailbox store whilst the current store is still running. Use of the RSG on a production server won't interfere with the users as the RSG is logically isolated; users cannot log into it, and mail cannot be delivered to it. As you can probably guess, the main benefit here is that you don't necessarily need a spare disaster recovery server in its own Active Directory forest to recover a single mailbox or single mailbox store, as was required in Exchange 2000.

Also, one other benefit of the RSG is something that is referred to as a "dial tone recovery strategy". The idea here is to create a brand new blank database in the event of problems with the production database. This way, your users are up and running much quicker and can send and receive new messages straight away. The failed production database can then be restored to the RSG, the old data extracted using ExMerge, and then transferred back into the users' mailboxes. Of course, once the production database is available again, it makes sense to put the temporary dial tone database into the RSG and recover the data from this database, since it will be much smaller than the restored production database.

For more information regarding your Exchange Server or any type of Exchange Migration or Exchange Server upgrade please contact us at 888-603-6333 ext 89