Recovery Storage Group/Exchange Restore

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Hi guys,

So i didnt have a good day today.......

We were trying to test extracting a mailbox from a backed up exchange store and I ended up dismounting one of the live stores.......

Hoping you guys can help however as I am still confused.

We backup our stores using CommVault which can restore the store data to a server which has an exchange iDataAgent on it, i.e. other exchange servers or the original. We happened to have a spare exchange server doing nothing which I restored our smallest store to. I used the options in CommVault to dismount store on restore and to save it to a new location (created a new folder). It didnt appear to touch the exchange environment as I could see nothign change in system manager.

We actually needed a larger store but didnt have the space on the test exchange server. So I thought as I had tested it and found it didnt seem to touch the exchange environment - I restored the store to the same server it came off - with the same options... And watched in horror as the list of mailboxes dissappeared in system manager. I managed to right click and select mount database to restore it after I had killed the backup.

I can only assume that it was because it was being restored back to the same exchange server it came from.

My question is - is it necessary to use restore exchange stores to a different exchange server to get the raw .edb and .stm files without affecting the production environment? Or am I missing something in the backup software?

My second question is... Once restored, how to you get the files to mount in a recovery storage group? If we move the restored log files, .edb files and .stm files into the recovery group storage folder and right click on the recovery storagy group and select mount database, it seems to query AD and find all the live stores in the list - but doesnt let us add these raw files?

Any help would be appreciated!

Many thanks
Steve