Restore Microsoft Exchange 2016 or 2019 Mailbox Database to Microsoft Exchange SE

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Can you restore a Microsoft Exchange 2016 or 2019 mailbox database to a Microsoft Exchange SE server? The short answer is yes you can, but you must use the Recovery Database approach.

Why would you want to? Well, if like us you are moving at pace to Microsoft Exchange SE to ensure you are on a supported platform, you potentially in future may need to restore a mailbox from Exchange 2016 to Exchange SE, when you’ve decommissioned and removed all your legacy Exchange 2016 servers. Of course you wouldn’t want to have to keep a 2016 server hanging around forever, nor would you want to have a separate environment for just such a restore, that you’d also need to keep running.

So during our testing, it became apparent that a direct restoration of a 2016 database to Exchange SE is not possible, i.e. just restoring a database and trying to mount it on Exchange SE.

However by use of the Recovery Database mechanism you can indeed restore a database from Exchange 2016 to Exchange SE into a Recovery Database, and from that then you can use a MailboxRestoreRequest to restore the data from the recovery mailboxes within the database back into their current mailbox on Exchange SE, or a recovery mailbox on Exchange SE.

A very short overview is given below:

New-MailboxDatabase -Recovery -Name restoredb -Server exchangeSE01 -EdbFilePath F:\restoredb \restoredb .edb -LogFolderPath F:\restoredb \

Perform the restoration from your recovery software redirecting the restore to the Recovery Database: RestoreDB.

Now start a mailbox restore request from the Recovery Database to the desired restoration mailbox (either current or a special restore mailbox).

New-MailboxRestoreRequest –SourceDatabase <identity name> –SourceStoreMailbox "<display name>" –TargetMailbox <restore mailbox display name> -AllowLegacyDNMismatch
New-MailboxRestoreRequest –SourceDatabase restoredb –SourceStoreMailbox "bobsmith" –TargetMailbox "restoremailbox" -AllowLegacyDNMismatch

Now that finding the “Display Name” can be tricky, so ensure you are referring to the mailbox by this name. In the example above, we are restoring bobsmith’s mailbox into restoremailbox.

All being well the restored data should reappear, you can monitor the request with:

Get-MailboxRestoreRequest | Get-MailboxRestoreRequestStatistics

Once you are done, you can remove the Recovery Mailbox with:

Remove-MailboxDatabase -Identity restoredb

And then tidy up your restore mailbox if required.

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