Performing Single Item Recovery in Exchange Server 2010

Restoring single item from Exchange 2010 is not an easy task if user had deleted that item accidently, even becomes more critical if you don’t have any reliable tool and you have to restore single item manually! However you can recover whole mailbox data for recovery of a single item, but this process might be time consuming too; and it is also not the right way to restore just a single mailbox item. 

So avoid the limitation of one specific item recovery, Microsoft brings Single item recovery in Exchange server 2010 which simplifies recovery of a single item without restoring entire mailbox or mailbox database.

So today we will illuminate methods to search and recover missing item, and also suggest you the best tool to easily recover any item individually from Exchange 2010 mailbox without using Power shell commands.

But before start the manual method, you need to know the following-

• This process may take 15-30 minutes. 
•  You need to provide specificpermission. 
•  Verify that single item recovery must be enabled for a mailbox before the item you need to recover is removed.   
•  To search and recover missing item, you have the following info-

1.       Source Mailbox: The mailbox which is being searched.

2.       Target Mailbox: It is the discovery mailbox where missing item will be recovered. However Exchange setup creates a mailbox by-default but if you want to create extra discovery mailbox, you can also createa discovery mailbox.

3.       Search Criteria: It contains sender or recipient, or phrases/keywords in the message.

Now follow the below steps-

Search and recover missing item:

Run the following shell command to search user mailbox and copy item to discovery mailbox.

Here we take an example where we searched for items in May Stewart's mailbox that meets the following criteria:

·         Sender : Alexander

·         Keyword : Colombia

Search-Mailbox "May Stewart" -SearchQuery "from:'Alexander' AND Colombia" -TargetMailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -TargetFolder "May Stewart Recovery" -LogLevel Full

If you want to verify above shell command worked or not, log on to the discovery mailbox which you selected as the target mailbox and review the search command outcomes.

Restore Recovered Items:

You can restore the item to user’s mailbox once it has been recovered to discovery mailbox.

Run the below cmdlet to restore items to May Stewart's mailbox and deletes it from Discovery search mailbox.

Search-Mailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SearchQuery "from:'Alexander' AND Colombia" -TargetMailbox "May Stewart" -TargetFolder "Recovered Messages" -LogLevel Full –DeleteContent

Again, you can check recovered item in target folder to verify that above command has successfully recovered messing item.

Use Shell command to Export & Import Items from PST:

Now export content from mailbox to PST file and again import content of PST file to a mailbox.

Run following command to export item from May Stewart's Recovery in the Discovery Search Mailbox to PST file.

New-MailboxExportRequest -Mailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SourceRootFolder "May Stewart Recovery" -ContentFilter {Subject -eq "May travel plans"} -FilePath \\MYSERVER\HelpDeskPst\MayStewartRecovery.pst

Now import messages from a PST file to the folder Recovered by Helpdesk in May Stewart's mailbox.

New-MailboxImportRequest -Mailbox "May Stewart" -TargetRootFolder "Recovered By Helpdesk" -FilePath \\MYSERVER\HelpDeskPst\MayStewartRecovery.pst

Mailbox Item Recovery with Third Party Tool

Of course above solution is bit complex to recover a single item. So I suggest you to use a prominent third party tool to perform single item recovery on the basis of 'To', 'Subject', 'From', 'Cc', 'Attachment Name', 'Body', 'Item Type' etc. with fewer clicks. 

Try Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery Software. It comes with demo version, so you can see how it works and how helpful to recover any item from Exchange server 2010. This utility is also worth to buy as it support to latest version Exchange 2013 too!

So my personal recommendation is, give it a try. It really works!

Hope, you found above solution helpful.