Restoring an Exchange Mailbox
Information Technology offers limited capability to restore Exchange mailbox data that has been inadvertently deleted. The mailbox restore can target specific items such as a mail folder(s), calendar items, or items within a date range. Due to the effort involved in this type of restore, there is a flat $250.00 charge associated with this effort.
It is important to understand that there are many ways a user can organize and configure their Outlook email and calendar items including storing data locally on the user's computer Since we backup mailbox data at night, we can only successfully restore items that were in your Exchange mailbox for at least one overnight backup. We are not able to restore missing mailbox data that was configured to be stored locally on desktops or departmental servers.
Email items deleted from mailbox beyond 60 days cannot be restored due to our backup retention period.
In the past, a single restore could require up to a week for IT to setup a separate, temporary email system on which to perform the restore. Therefore, this service was limited only to legal matters.
The $250.00 charge is necessary for the following reasons:
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Mailbox restores are a time consuming process that must be done carefully to avoid unintentional overwrites of data. Typical restores with our current tools take up to four hours.
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Extra hardware and "scratch space" has been purchased and made available to the campus email infrastructure specifically to accommodate this procedure. Mailbox restores are a two-step process, whereby, we restore the entire mailbox to the scratch space and then do a targeted export and import into the user's live mailbox.
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Depending on the request, we may incur costs associated with off-site tape retrieval. We use a courier service and they have a fee schedule for emergency deliveries.
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Demand management. We feel it is important to charge so we can offer this important service for matters of critical University business.
Before performing a restore, our technicians will work with you to exhaust all other possible means of recovering deleted items. In the event a restore is necessary, we will need a Service Unit Request sent to our IT Service Desk authorizing the charges.