Steps to Restore Exchange 5.5 Server Using Online Backup

• Network (Diagram 1) First let’s take a look at the logical network configuration.
  We have a Windows 2003 domain and an NT 4.0 domain with a two-way external trust established between them. There is an Exchange 5.5 server at each domain. One Exchange 5.5 Organization spans both domains and includes two Exchange 5.5 Sites.

• The Plan (Diagram 2) is to restore Exchange1 to new hardware preserving its name and IP address. We are going to use NTBACKUP which comes with Windows 2000 server. As long as you are using Exchange aware online backup the steps outlined in this tutorial should work for you. The whole process is transparent to the end users and no reconfiguring of their e-mail profiles is required.

• You can see that after restoring the Directory and Information store from online backup a "Restore in Progress" registry key is created. It identifies the list of "EDB #####.log" files which should be replayed by Exchange server.

• Normally the backup takes place at night and after it finishes new log files are created. If you want to commit that data to the restored Exchange 5.5 server you have to copy manually these files. When you start the Exchange services Exchange server plays the log files identified in the "Restore in Progress" value, and then continues playing all log files as long as there is no break in the numerical sequence of these log files.

• The most common problems which you might encounter in such scenario are:
  - Not using the original Organization and Site name (especially if the Display name differs from the directory name)
  - Choosing to join instead of creating a new Org and Site with the same name during the installation of the new Exchange 5.5 server.
  - Using different path for the database files on the new machine (Normally Exchange can not replay log files into a database that has been moved from its original path location. If this is the case you have to modify the "EDB_RstMap" value under the "Restore in Progress" key. This value maps an old path to a new path)