In certain situations, Traditional restore method may not be best approach when considering other options and dial tone recovery is one such option. A dial tone recovery is a little bit more complicated compared to usual method of database restoration, but it can be useful if less downtime is preferred than simple restore methods. The method to lessen the downtime of exchange server functionality is to get the server back in running mode before the actual user data is recovered. This enables users to start sending and receiving messages without having to wait for long time till everything is completely recovered. Since the server is back in running state, now you are free to recover the actual data without having pressure of downtime.
To understand the technique better, let’s assume that we have an Exchange Server which completely failed during some kind of catastrophe and all the other servers on the network are still functional. We will also assume that you have a functional backup of the Exchange Server.
In a situation where a server has physical failure, follow these below steps:
- You should start recovery process by first using the Active Directory Users and Computers console to delete the server’s computer account from the Active Directory.
- Then, you must also delete each and every user’s mailbox by selecting multiple user accounts and perform the delete operation.
- After clearing the Active Directory, you should install exchange server on replacement server. Note:you should make sure that Exchange Server is running the same service pack level as the server that was destroyed to maintain compatibility.
- Once your new replacement server is up and running, you will have to access Active Directory Users and Computers console and create mailboxes for all the users deleted previously by using multiple user account selection to perform all necessary mailbox creation simultaneously.
After finishing the above steps, the new replacement server should be online and functional. All the users will be able to access their new mailboxes, but Outlook may have to be reinitialized due to recreation of mailboxes. In these circumstances where time is of the essence, you may want to instruct users to access Exchange Server through OWA rather than through Outlook until you completely finish the recovery operation via EdbMails recovery tool.