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.

Yesterday, I installed DPM 2007 in our lab environment. Today, it is time to try out the protection features for Exchange 2003 and 2007.

Obviously, I don't have access to a tape library in our virtual environment so I configured DPM with one disk for the storage pool. I created a 30GB disk and added it to the storage pool. That is done in the Management section of the management console (click to enlarge):

When you add a disk, it is wiped clean and cannot be used for anything else. Make sure that you provide an empty disk to DPM. At first, I provided a disk formatted with NTFS thinking that DPM would wipe it. On that disk however, there was no space for protection.

After that, I deployed agents to an Exchange 2003 virtual machine and an Exchange 2007 virtual machine (click to enlarge):

A reboot is required because the agent includes a storage filter driver. The storage filter driver is used to create a bitmap of changed blocks on disk. That information is then used during the creation of express full backups. More about that later.

You don't have to deploy the agent from the console. You can deploy the agent with Group Policy, SMS, script or put it in your unattended server installation.

To protect Exchange (or anything else for that matter), you need to create a protection group. You just click Create Protection Group... in the Protection section of the management console. In the wizard that follows you first select the group members. Depending on the role of the server, you will be able to select what to backup. In the case of Exchange 2003/2007, the screen looks like this (click to enlarge):

Next, you have to select the kind of protection you want (to disk, to tape, to disk/to tape):

Because I protect Exchange servers, an Exchange specific question is asked: "Run Eseutil to check data integrity?". When you do that, eseutil will be run on the DPM server to verify the backups. You need to copy the required binaries to the DPM server if you want to do that.

Next, you need to set short-term objectives:

In this example, I retain backups for 21 days. Every 15 minutes, a synchronization will occur. For Exchange, this results in copying the transaction logs to the DPM server. If you observe the screenshot, you can see that an express full backup is also created every day at 0:00. An express full is a full backup in the sense that you have all the data but it is not a real full because not all data is copied accross every time you take a backup. Instead, only the changes are sent from the source server to DPM. With an express full every day and recovery points (transaction logs) every 15 minutes you have a lot of recovery points to revert to in case something goes wrong.

Based on the number of recovery points, the wizard will propose disk allocation for protection:

You need an initial copy of the protected data. You can let DPM do this for you or you can make a copy yourself and transfer the data using removable media. That last option is useful if you have a slow link. I let DPM make the copy and finished the wizard. In the protection section, you can now see what you are protecting:

After a while, the replica creation will finish and the protection status should be set to OK. In the Monitoring section, you get a nice overview of the jobs past, running and scheduled:

In a next post, I will talk a bit about recovering Exchange data.