This post will show how to recovery / restore  a mailbox that have been deleted from exchange and is past the mailbox database retention period for keeping deleted mailboxes, the senario here will be that the user have been delted in Exchange and AD and enough time have passed to the mailbox have been purged from Exchange Store but we still have a valid backup on disk/tape where the mailbox is present

In the demo I have set the Keep Delted Mailboxes for one day so let exchange cleanup after myself.

For testing purpose the Keep Deleted Mailboxes have been set to 1 day

To delete the mailbox and user select the mailbox in the interface and “Remove”

And Accept the deletion

Verify that the mailbox is deleted and found under disconnected mailbox.

When we look at the recovery selections for the mailbox database the user mailbox is visible from the older backups

after the mailbox have been deleted and we look at the recovery points the mailbox is no longer visible , for this post we need to find a recovery point where the mailbox we are looking after is still on tape/disk.

Fast Forward 24 hours

and our mailboxes are nowhere to be seen.

We then need to create a recovery database to be able to restore the mailbox database without overwriting the production database

We use New-Mailboxdatabase with the –Recovery to create the database syntax below in the technet article

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee332321.aspx

on the dpm server we need to find a recovery point where the mailbox is shown recovery selection for the database

Start the recovery of the database

Recovery to a Exchange server so we can use Exchange powershell to complete the restore of the mailbox

Select target server and the recovery database we have created earlier

and hit Recover to start the restore

Test databases are fast to restore

The following are the restore that needs to be initiated from powershell to get the data back

If we go a get-mailboxstatistics –Database Restore we can see the mailboxes present in the mailbox database that have been restored

to restore the mailbox to a different user we need to use AllowLegacyDNMismatch

New-MailboxRestoreRequest –Sourcedatabase Restore –SourceStoreMailbox “mailbox01” –TargetMailbox Administrator –AllowLegacyDNMismatch –Targetfolder Restore

Syntax for New-MailboxRestoreRequest below on technet article

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff829875.aspx

and to verify that the restore have completed use get-mailboxrestorerequest

and though owa/outlook we can see the mailbox being restored to the Restore folder.