Exchange 2010 includes the capability to ensure that deleted items are retained within the dumpster till the deleted item retention period. This prevents accidentally or maliciously deleted items...
Updated Jul 01, 2019
Version 2.0
Blog Post
I have been giving this "backupless" option for Exchange 2010 some serious thoughts and have been carefully running through all possible scenario's where user's are reporting "lost or disappeared" mails.
Considering that database copies are my safety net for server or database disasters, and lagged database copies can only go as far as 14 days, can I really respond to all my user requests for mail recovery if I don't have a good-old Exchange backup? In other words, can single item recovery be my salvation?
I'm having difficulties understanding what is really ment with "item". Are we talking "folders" in the same way? Or should we only consider the legal aspects and do away with anything that has no legal value such as a folder structure and how people have organized their content ?
Consider the following scenario's:
1. a user reports that he or she has accidentally deleted an entire folder (some of them really organize their mails in hundreds of folders and subfolders), and this folder is nowhere to be found in the deleted items folder nor in the recover deleted items. At most they can provide a couple of key words to search for, but that would only cover a fraction of all the mails that were in there.
2. Using Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 (no SP1, no rollup yet), I created a root+subfolder and put 1 mail item in the subfolder. I then deleted the root folder. Looking at the deleted items folder I can perfectly see and thus recover my entire structure along with the mails. However, as soon as these folders are deleted from the deleted items, they can no longer be found in the recover deleted items, only the mail item can. You can restore the mail item, but there's no way you can restore the entire folder structure the same way you can when recovering from the deleted items folder. You can try the mailbox discovery option in ECP, but you cannot search for "the entire folder structure and all emails in it".
3. Another one: what if a user has accidentally "moved" an entire folder structure, but is unable to find it ? These things do happen in real life, I agree not every day, but when it does, how do you respond to that if you can't do a point-in-time restore of the user's mailbox ?
Considering that database copies are my safety net for server or database disasters, and lagged database copies can only go as far as 14 days, can I really respond to all my user requests for mail recovery if I don't have a good-old Exchange backup? In other words, can single item recovery be my salvation?
I'm having difficulties understanding what is really ment with "item". Are we talking "folders" in the same way? Or should we only consider the legal aspects and do away with anything that has no legal value such as a folder structure and how people have organized their content ?
Consider the following scenario's:
1. a user reports that he or she has accidentally deleted an entire folder (some of them really organize their mails in hundreds of folders and subfolders), and this folder is nowhere to be found in the deleted items folder nor in the recover deleted items. At most they can provide a couple of key words to search for, but that would only cover a fraction of all the mails that were in there.
2. Using Outlook 2010 and Exchange 2010 (no SP1, no rollup yet), I created a root+subfolder and put 1 mail item in the subfolder. I then deleted the root folder. Looking at the deleted items folder I can perfectly see and thus recover my entire structure along with the mails. However, as soon as these folders are deleted from the deleted items, they can no longer be found in the recover deleted items, only the mail item can. You can restore the mail item, but there's no way you can restore the entire folder structure the same way you can when recovering from the deleted items folder. You can try the mailbox discovery option in ECP, but you cannot search for "the entire folder structure and all emails in it".
3. Another one: what if a user has accidentally "moved" an entire folder structure, but is unable to find it ? These things do happen in real life, I agree not every day, but when it does, how do you respond to that if you can't do a point-in-time restore of the user's mailbox ?