Creating a Recovery Storage Group

If you would like to recover a single mailbox on your production Exchange Server 2003 you are able to do so. You just have to add and configure the fifth storage group on your server – known as Recovery Storage Group and you will not have to configure your separate recovery server in an isolated forest as you had to do with Exchange 2000 Server.

You do not have to install a second Exchange Server environment in an isolated forest to restore a single mailbox or a single mailbox item. You can use the recovery storage group to restore a mailbox database onto your running Exchange Server 2003. After having done this you now have to extract the mailbox you want to recover using the ExMerge utility.

ADModify.net is an excellent tool for Exchange and Network administrators allowing bulk modifications of Active Directory objects. The tool was designed by the Exchange Support Services team using C# .Net 2003. Essentially, you can use it to change any Active Directory attribute of an object or select multiple objects to make attribute changes in bulk. Even those attributes not available in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) can be specified by Name and Value making ADModify.NET a truly essential tool for administrators.

This tool has saved my life on more than one occasion when I used it, with great success, to recover from a hardware failure on Exchange server.

ADModify.NET has many uses. However, for the purposes of this article, we will cover the following topics:

• Getting Started
• Modifying Attributes
• Using ADModify.NET to recover from a hardware failure
• Undo feature
• Bulk Add a User to Mailbox Rights

Here at www.msexchangelibrary.com we will go through the step of working with this great tool!