To recover Exchange data with DPM, you first need to select a recovery point. The Recovery section of the management console contains a handy calendar to select such a recovery point. Every bolded date contains recovery points:

Most of the time, you will need to recover user data on the mailbox level instead of the entire database. You first select a time to go to (usually not Latest) and with a double click on the name of the database, the mailboxes in the database are shown. You can then right click on a user and select Recover... to start the wizard-driven process. The options in the wizard are simple and usually you will recover to an Exchange server database in a recovery storage group:

DPM does not create the recovery storage group for you so you need to create one using PowerShell cmdlets or the Exchange Server 2007 Troubleshooting Assistant. If you use Exchange Server 2003, you just create the recovery storage group with the Exchange System Manager. In the screenshot above, you can see I restore to a database called Mailbox Database in a recovery storage group called RSG. When you reach the end of the wizard and start the recovery, you can switch to the Monitoring section to check the recovery status.

NOTE: don't think that because you restore on the mailbox level that you can get a PST. The DPM restore is always a mailbox database (edb) and log files. You need to use Exchange tools to get a PST if you wish.

When the database is restored, the work in DPM is finished. You now need to use Exchange tools to mount the database in the recovery storage group and recover the mailbox data. A few options are available:

• You can use the Troubleshooting Assistant (Exchange 2007) to merge the content of the user's restored mailbox with his current mailbox.
• You can use the restore-mailbox cmdlet (Exchange 2007) to copy the user's restored mailbox to a subfolder of another mailbox.
• You can use ExMerge 2003 (Exchange 2003) to do the same as restore-mailbox or to export to a pst file.

The restore-mailbox cmdlet works like this:

restore-mailbox -id "Administrator" -RSGDatabase "RSG\Mailbox Database" -RSGMailbox "Geert Baeke" -TargetFolder "geba"

The above command restores the mailbox of Geert Baeke (in the Mailbox Database of RSG) to the live mailbox of Administrator in a subfolder called geba:

Conclusion

It is very easy to recover Exchange 2003/2007 data with DPM 2007. I only touched on recovery of individual mailboxes but there are other possibilities like restoring entire mailbox databases to the original location, to a network folder and so on. The keyword here is flexibility!!! Later posts will show how to recovery data from other workloads like SharePoint and SQL Server.