How to do granular recovery for Exchange by using Stellar Repair for Exchange

Summary: Recovering Exchange database after a disaster is a lengthy and time consuming task. While it takes care of minor dispersed errors and anomalies within the database, sometimes, all that needs to be recovered are a few emails or some critical mailboxes. In such scenarios investing high amounts of time and effort to recover the entire database can feel like a waste. Granular recovery for Exchange using Stellar Repair for Exchange can prove beneficial in such situations.

An essential aspect of Exchange administration is performing regular backups and initiating recovery procedures from these backups if disasters strike. Not only does backup recovery put things back in their right place, it also fixes minor glitches and inconsistencies that can crop up within the database unexpectedly. Apart from disaster recovery, restoring from backup is also needed when organizations need to get a hold of old user mailboxes containing critical emails or project discussions. Or maybe dig up the email communication of an ex-employee for continuing discussions related to ongoing work.

When any such need presents itself, performing a recovery procedure on the entire database can seem futile. Why waste all that time and resources on a detailed recovery procedure when all you really need is to get hold of a few critical mailboxes or some important emails? It is precisely then that some kind of workaround is needed that can recover selected Exchange data from the database and save it in a format of choice. Over the past years, Granular Recovery Technology has emerged as that very workaround.

What is Granular Recovery Technology (GRT)?

Granular Recovery Technology, or GRT, allows Exchange administrators to restore individual items directly from any full database backup. It doesn’t need you to adopt any different technique while taking the backup, but it lets you recover exactly and only the data that you wish to recover from the full database backup. The types of backups which support the recovery of individual items using GRT include:

• Full or user-directed backups
• VMware backups that protect Exchange
• Local snapshot backups
• Off-host snapshot backups
• Instant recovery backups, when the schedule copies the snapshot to a storage unit
• Replica snapshot backups

Scenarios that require Granular Recovery for Exchange

Organizations across the world opt for Exchange granular recovery procedures in the following scenarios:

• If they need to retrieve accidentally deleted or lost email messages
• If they need to recover a particular employee’s entire mailbox
• To search messages during internal investigations

Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t offer any direct method or tool which facilitates granular recovery for Exchange. Thus, if you need to pull out specific data from your Exchange database (EDB) file, you’d have to rely on a competent and safe third-party product.

The best way to perform Granular Recovery for Exchange

If your organization relies on Microsoft Exchange Servers for all communication, storage, and collaboration needs, your database would probably be quite large in size. And sooner or later, you will surely experience the need to extract some specific information from that large database. When that happens, the best way to ensure that you get your hands on the information you need in the shortest and cleanest manner is to use reliable and competent Exchange recovery software, Stellar Repair for Exchange.

Stellar Repair for Exchange lets you pull out all or some selected information from EDB files and save it on the disk in a format of your choice. The software is backed by some very powerful algorithms which enable it to scan EDB files and make all data stored within them recoverable. Once the EDB file has been scanned by the software, you can select, preview, and recover the exact files or folders that you want and save them at a destination of your choice, and in a format of your choosing.

Here are the steps you can use to perform granular recovery for Exchange using this software:

1. Download, install, and launch Stellar Repair for Exchange 

2. From the software’s main screen, select the EDB file from which you wish to extract information. If you’re unaware of the exact location of the EDB file on the system, you can use the convenient ‘Find’ option given by the software
3. Once the file has been selected, pick a scanning mode (Quick or Extensive) to allow the software to skim through the EDB file
4. When the scan finishes, all recoverable data will be listed within the software’s left hand panel in a tree-view list. You can select and preview any item from here in the ‘Mailbox Items’ tab in the middle panel
5. To recover selective information, in the software’s middle panel, click on the ‘Search Criteria’ tab

6. Here, fill in the search criteria (To, From, CC, Subject, Body, Attachment Name, Importance, Item Type, Date Range, etc.) using which the software will search and list the exact email messages you wish to recover
7. Click on ‘Search’ to initiate the search for selected information
8. When the information you’re looking for is listed by the software, preview it if you desire and then proceed to save it by clicking on the ‘Save’ button from the main menu
9. On clicking the ‘Save’ button you’ll see a pop-up where you’ll need to select whether you wish to save search results by any criteria, exact match, or both

10. Here, you’ll also need to select the output format in which you wish to save the recovered data. Your choices will include PST, MSG, EML, HTML, RTF, and PDF
11. Select a destination folder where you wish the data be saved after recovery and click on the ‘OK’ button to complete the task

When the process finishes, all the data you selected will be saved in the format of your choice at the destination of your choosing.

Conclusion: 

In addition to offering granular recovery, Stellar Repair for Exchange also comes equipped with a ton of other great features like data recovery from dismounted and offline EDB files, also it repairs large and multiple EDB files, a capability to export recovered data to Live Exchange / Office 365, and much more. This software is indeed the one-stop solution for all Exchange requirements.

Let us take a look at our MVP review for exchange recovery from Stellar.