A customer accidentally deleted some mailboxes from an Exchange Server 5.5 system. The company doesn't have any backups, but I managed to copy priv.edb to a separate server. Can I recover those mailboxes? Priv.edb has the same size and timestamp on both servers.
Prepare to meet your doom, Jan. After you delete an Exchange 5.5 mailbox, it's gone, and you can't expect to recover it. Therefore, you can see why regular backups of your mail data are very important. If you have a good backup of the Information Store (IS) from before the mailbox deletion, you can easily restore that backup to a recovery server and save the mail in a Personal Folders Store (.pst) file. Exchange 2000 Server includes a deleted-mailbox cache that works like the deleted-item retention cache—when you accidentally delete a mailbox, you can still recover it (provided you're in the retention period).
