How to Restore disconnected Mailbox in Exchange Properly

Anytime a user may face a problem with a disconnected mailbox in Exchange server that too in different situations. Hence, you may want to restore disconnected mailbox in Exchange that too in same Archive directory. Or you may wish to connect to a different (existing) Archive user account. Further user may want to restore it to a newly created mailbox.

All this is possible through different methods but the most efficient and effective way is to recover corrupted EDB File. The reason for suggesting this software is that the manual or free solutions can be problematic to use and requires a lot of effort & time. While the direct tool will resolve these issues and will provide you best results. Otherwise, a manual solution to reconnect disconnected mailbox in Exchange is also discussed in the later section of the blog.

Before Restoring Disconnected Mailbox in Exchange

There are some points that are necessary to be acknowledged by the user before performing any recovery or reconnecting procedure. Usually, these notes will help the user using the manual solutions which are to be discussed in the next section.

1. The user needs to have full permission to perform the restore request on disconnected mailboxes.
2. Also, make sure that the mailbox used to connect the disconnected mailbox is present i.e not been soft-deleted.
3.  Moreover, the manual procedure may require some technical expertise to run the commands and also the implementation may take some time to reconnect the database.

Method to Restore disconnected mailbox in Exchange Server 2016

Note: The disconnected user mailbox also includes disabled, deleted and soft-deleted mailboxes. Therefore the solutions will work for any of the cases.

1. Use Connect-mailbox cmdlet or Exchange Administrative Center

The command will help you to recover disconnect mailbox in Exchange user account.

For EAC

• Open Mailboxes from the Recipient
• Now you need to figure-out all disconnected mailboxes by clicking on More… option followed by Connect a mailbox.
• Click on Disconnected user mailboxes and then tab to Reconnect.
• Select the Yes option in the window that is showing a confirmation message of whether to reconnect the mailbox.

For Power Shell Command

You can use Connect-Mailbox cmdlet to restore disconnected mailbox in Exchange. For this, you need to specify the mailbox type i.e “User”, “Linked” or “Shared” as they have different syntax for each. Below is given a syntax of a User mailbox command.

Connect-Mailbox -Identity “ABC” -Database MBXDB01 -User “ABC”

Here the parameter Identity and User refer to the active directory user account that is disconnected.

2. Use New-MailboxRestoreRequest cmdlet

This approach will merge the data of disabled mailboxes with an already existing mailbox. It uses Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) to restore the disconnected mailbox in Exchange.

In order to create a mailbox restore request – the user has to use the display name, legacy distinguished name (DN), GUID of user mailbox that might have been deleted. To display the value already deleted DisplayName, LegacyDN or MailboxGuid properties then you need to use Get-mailboxStatistics cmdlet.

Get-MailboxDataabase | Get-mailboxStatistics | Where {$_.DisconnectedReason -eq “Disabled”} | fl DisplayName,MailboxGuid,LegacyDN,Database

Example:

New-MailboxRestoreRequest -SourceStoreMailbox “e487” -SourceDatabase MBXDB01 -TargetMailbox “xyz” -AllowLegacyDNMismatch

Explanation of above example:

Now the recovery request is generated for “xyz” which is located at the “MBXDB01” location. the “AllowLegacyDNMismatch” parameter is used to store the recovered mailbox at a different location of some other user mailbox. Also, the different mailbox should be the one that does not have same DN value.

Conclusion

It is clear that you can either use simple and user-friendly direct solution or a manual fix to restore disconnected mailbox in Exchange server. Also, you might have an idea about what is the best choice to achieve the results with accuracy.