Exchange 2013 Restore

I need to restore the Contacts folder for a user. I will restore it to an admin mailbox and then email the required contact to the user from there. Pretty straightforward.

1) Create a recovery DB. The recovery DB is called “RDB”. I store it on the D: drive in a folder called “Recovery”.

2) Open Services and restart the Exchange Information Store service.

3) Set the recovery DB as over-writeable.

4) I backup using DPM/ Azure Backup Server. Restore as per here.

5) Make a restore request from the recovery DB for the Contacts folder. I will restore this to a folder called Recovery in the administrator user. The switches below are for that:

The -AllowLegacyDNMismatch is required because I am restoring to a different mailbox.

6) Keep an eye on the progress via the Get-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet. You can get stats this way if required:

That’s it!

If I hadn’t restored to a recovery DB via DPM and brought it to a cleanly shutdown state I can follow instructions along these lines to do that.