I will describe small steps to recover a mailbox from Windows Server Backup. It includes steps like restroing the backup file from WSB to an alternate location, creation of recovery database and restoring the mailbox

1. Recovery from backup:

1. Start WSB on the server and select Recover from the Action menu

2. On the Getting Started screen select This server to specify the location of the backups and then I’ll click Next

3. On the Select Backup Date screen select the date and click ‘Next’

4. On the Select Recovery Type screen select Applications and then click Next:

5. On the Select Application screen select ‘Exchange’ for the application to recover, then I’ll click Next

6. On the Specify Recovery Options screen, restore the backup to an alternate location

7. On the Confirmation screen, hit the Recover button to start the recovery

8. When the restore was successful, click Close and navigate to the location to see the files recoverd

2. Check the database state: In order for Exchange to mount a database, it needs to be in a clean shutdown state. Use the following command to view the status: eseutil /mh DB01.edb. If the database state can be seen as Dirty Shutdown, run the following command to do a soft recovery:

eseutil /r e01 /d

The /r specifies that I’m doing a soft recovery. The e01 is the log generation prefix for the database. The /d switch without any arguments to specify the database path, which is in the current directory.

Once the operation has completed successfully, I can run eseutil again with the /mh switch to verify the database is clean shutdown

3. Creating a Recovery Database: Use the New-MailboxDatabase cmdlet with the following syntax:

New-MailboxDatabase -Name RecoveryDB -EdbFilePath E:RecoveryDBE_DB01DB01.edb -LogFolderPath E:RecoveryDBE_DB01DB01.edb -LogFolderPath E:RecoveryDBE_DB01 -Recovery -Server mbx1

Mount the database using the following command: Mount-Database RecoveryDB. The Recovery database is now mounted, and ready to restore mailbox data.

4. Finding the mailbox and restore:

To do a complete restore of the mailbox data to the original mailbox that is currently active in the production database use the following command:

New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceDatabase RecoveryDB -SourceStoreMailbox ‘user mailbox’ -TargetMailbox recoveredmails

See the progress of the operation by the following cmdlet:

Get-MailboxRestoreRequest | Get-MailboxRestoreRequestStatistics