Restore Exchange mail after upgrade and decommission?

Question

I recently upgraded our Exchange 2007 environment to Exchange 2010 and decommissioned the Exchange 2007 servers.

We have almost 2 years worth of backups for our Exchange 2007 environment that would seem pretty useless to me now, since I cannot restore a mailbox or GRT restore an email to the existing Exchange 2010 servers.

I can't exactly introduce another Exch2007 box into production easily and building up a whole VM environment separate from production might not even work.

Any solution? To be honest I don't need this functionality at the moment, but would like to know how in case it comes up. What do companies with SoX compliance do when they upgrade? Or is it a requirement to use 3rd party email archiving instead that can restore to even a simple text file if needed?

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's no way to mount an Exchange 2007 mailbox or datastore in 2010, so if you're looking to do a quick, simple restore you need to use third party software.

If your overlords want to cheap out, then you'd build up a VM environment, yeah. It's not that hard; you basically need a Domain Controller and an Exchange 2007 box just long enough to restore the mail to, and then convert it out to .pst or .msg or whatever else. Of course, it does make a simple task take a few hours. So, when I can't just say no!, I definitely prefer the third-party tool solution. I think I've used these guys before, but my plan for what to do if I ever needed this functionality has been a P.O. for the software, or a lot of bitching and standing up of VMs.

Although, at the moment, our SarbOx compliance strategy is to not backup the Exchange server. At all. I'm migrating us off it now, and to be honest, I'm a little disappointed that we're probably going to get away with the no email backups strategy.