Exchange Server 2010 brings new features that allow companies to protect their emails without performing any backups. These features introduce the concept known as Exchange Native Data Protection, formerly known as Backup-less Exchange Organization.

This article will describe how you can protect your data using Exchange Native Data Protection.

Important: Please note that Exchange Native Data Protection has requirements and recommendations that are not applicable to every company. In addition, experienced and qualified IT staff is required to deploy, maintain and monitor this type of organization.

One of the most important requirements is that companies should deploy a Database Availability Group DAG solution with at least three DAG members and three database copies of each database.

In order to protect the critical Exchange data, you should estimate the risks and develop an availability and recovery strategy for your organization. So let's see how we will address the following recovery operations using Exchange Native Data Protection:

• Recover an email item
• Recover a user mailbox
• Recover a mailbox database
• Recover a server

Recovering an Email Item

Configuring Email Item Retention

Since recovering an email item is the most common request from users, we start by describing how to protect and recover email items without performing a backup.

To begin we have to configure item retention. This feature has been already present in previous Exchange Server versions. Item retention can be configured at the mailbox database level or at the user mailbox level. Most commonly you will configure email item retention on the mailbox database, since this will automatically configure all user mailboxes in that database. You only configure email item retention on user mailboxes when you want to define exceptions, i.e. some users that will have different email item retention settings from the database settings.

Email item retention can be configured at the database level from the Exchange Management Console database properties:

The same settings may be defined using the Exchange Management Shell using:

Set-MailboxDatabase "Managers" -DeletedItemRetention dd.hh:mm:ss

The value is entered in the format dd.hh:mm:ss where d=days, h=hours, m=minutes, and s=seconds.

Deleted item retention can be set between 0 and 24855 days, where the default value is 14 days.

Email item retention per user can be configured using the Exchange Management Console from the user mailbox properties Mailbox Settings | Storage Quotas:

The same settings may be defined using the Exchange Management Shell:

Set-Mailbox -Identity "Vladimir Meloski" -UseDatabaseRetentionDefaults $false -RetainDeletedItemsFor dd.hh:mm:ss

We will now describe how we can recover this item using Microsoft Outlook 2010 and Microsoft Outlook Web App OWA.