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BP1013 Best Practices for Enhancing Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Data Protection and Availability 10
Once again, the presence of the required VSS writer is shown by DISKSHADOW.EXE:
Microsoft Exchange 2010 offers support for multiple ways to restore its mailbox databases and data.
Every way offers different advantages in terms of RPO and RTO.
In-place DB restore: Represents the restore of the database (*.edb file) in the same location where it
was originally. The data contained in the database is the data captured until the last checkpoint
occurred. To open the database, it has to be brought to a ‘Clean shutdown’ state.
Soft Recovery: Represents the Transaction Log Replay process, which you may decide to perform
after the restore of a database to bring it to a ‘Clean shutdown’ state, and then applying the required
set of transaction log files. This recovery process is known as ‘soft’, as opposed to the ‘hard’ recovery
process, because it happens without any loss of data; the transactions originally committed to the
Exchange storage sub-system are extracted from the logs and applied to the database.
Recovery Database: Represents a special database that can be mounted (maximum one per each
mailbox server) from a restored database as a special administrative resource not directly accessible by
users. It can only be accessed through PowerShell commands to allow granular data to be extracted
and exported to a regular database (merged into a mailbox or a folder).
Search Catalog: Is not strictly required to restore user data. It is a set of index files external to the
databases, and can be rebuilt on demand. If these files are omitted from a restore, however, an impact
in the level of service provided by the Exchange infrastructure (search response) has to be accepted.
The rebuild phase of the Content Index (crawling) is time intensive and increases the amount of read
access to the storage during the process.
Note: The previously named Microsoft Exchange Replication Service VSS writer is currently built to
support database backup operations, but not restore operations. Thus it is not possible to restore
directly to a passive copy of a DAG member while the replication service is active between the nodes.