Exchange Mailbox Recovery – Various Solutions for Recovery

Variety of users have been wanting to learn Exchange mailbox recovery methods to get their mailbox data back from disasters.

We have here the most useful methods explained for such troubled users so that their queries can be answered along with the solutions.

Recovering a mailbox from a user’s Exchange server could be led by deletion of the mailbox associated with an Active Directory account.

This Active Directory account is what allows users to access their data and perform all the other activities.

If you ever accidentally or knowingly delete a mailbox in EAC i.e. Exchange Admin Center, you may be led to recover deleted Exchange mailbox.

This is because the mailbox that has been deleted, the Active Directory user account and the associated attributes are also deleted. Due to this, it is now a disconnected mailbox and becomes inaccessible.

If all of this has happened in a few days only, say, before 30 days, then there is a chance to recover the mailbox. Since the retention policy states that any mailbox can be retained in the 30 days’ time period, you can perform Exchange Mailbox Recovery quite easily.

But how?

Here is How You Can Perform Exchange Mailbox Recovery

There are times when the mailbox items face certain issues during the recovery of mailboxes from Exchange file (EDB).

Since a single Exchange data file stores a huge number of files, there can be corruption issues due to the large data stored.

These are the majorly used techniques for retrieving lost mailboxes. Before starting with these methods, a user has to fulfill certain pre-requisites explained in the upcoming segment.

Pre-Requisites to Recover Deleted Exchange Mailbox

Make sure you identify the Active Directory user account before connecting the lost mailbox. For that, a new user account can be created or the details of an existing account which is not associated to any mailbox can be used.

To do so, run the Get-User cmdlet either to display all the user accounts in your company or for verifying a specific account’s details.

After that, use the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet for verification of the deleted mailbox and ensure that it did exist in the database & Exchange mailbox recovery can be performed.

If there are no results displayed after running this command, the mailbox may have been permanently deleted from the database.

Another thing that you need to do is assign the permissions that are needed to perform the operation.

Now, let’s go through the methods for mailbox recovery.

Method 1 – Connect Deleted Mailbox to Active Directory User Account

This procedure can be completed by using the EAC or Exchange Management Shell as given below:

1. Go to EAC and login to your account by entering the credentials to recover deleted Exchange mailbox.

2. Now, go to the Recipients section and choose the Mailboxes option to extend the list of mailboxes.

3. Select the More (…) icon and click on the Connect a Mailbox option.

4. Here, the deleted mailboxes will be displayed on your screen.

5. Navigate to the mailbox that needs to be connected to the user account in Active Directory and hit the Connect button.

6. In the new window, hit Yes when prompted for connecting the mailbox.

7. This will recover the deleted mailbox.

Exchange Mailbox Recovery Via Exchange Management Shell

To perform the task, you need to run Connect-Mailbox cmdlet to connect the mailbox to the user account in Active Directory. Following is the cmdlet to be executed.

Now, if you want to restore the lost mailboxes into an existing mailbox, the next technique can be used for recovering the data.

Method 2 - Recover Deleted Exchange Mailbox to Existing Mailbox

In this technique, the deleted mailbox can be recovered by retaining it to an existing mailbox wherein the content of the lost mailbox is copied to the destination mailbox.

Use the New-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet to restore the deleted mailbox. Here, the DisplayName, LegacyDN, & MailboxGuid properties of the lost mailbox will be viewed by using the Get-MailboxStatistics cmdlet.

The above mentioned command will return the information for all the disabled, deleted, or disconnected mailboxes.

For Exchange mailbox recovery, copy the MailboxGuid and run the given command.

After executing this restore request, the deleted mailbox data will be displayed in the target mailbox.

Both these methods are useful and should recover deleted Exchange mailbox by connecting it to a user account or retaining its content to an existing mailbox.

Wrapping Up

The techniques mentioned in this article help with recovering the lost or deleted mailboxes from an Exchange server by using either the PowerShell commands or EAC.

These are successful methods but require a certain level of technical expertise for Exchange mailbox recovery. This is why the software is mentioned to help users with no technical knowledge to recover their deleted mailboxes in a painless manner.