Restoring an email item using Single Item Recovery

Once RestoreUser has the appropriate permissions, we can proceed with searching the mailbox and recover the item of interest. This can be performed using both ECP and Exchange Management Shell.

In this procedure, the mailbox being searched is referred to as the Source Mailbox. The mailbox where items are restored is the Target Mailbox. The search process requires that we enter a Search Criteria needed to identify the item to be restored.

First we will see how to search and recover through the ECP interface, where we will be logged as RestoreUser. At the ECP select Mail Control, then click on New in order to open the New Mailbox Search window:

In the New Mailbox Search window, we can choose from different search criteria. In our example, we will enter the sender "IT Manager", and the mailbox that will be searched, "Vladimir Meloski".

In the same window we should specify a search name, for example "Deleted message from IT Manager", as well as the destination mailbox, by default the Discovery Search Mailbox. It is also recommended to select the option 'Send me an e-mail when the search is done', since the search might take long. The lower part of the same window is shown in the picture below:

Once the search is completed successfully, the following window will be displayed, which will contain the search name, the search status, as well as number and size of items discovered.

We can open the message that is discovered, by clicking open, which will redirect us to a new window, opening the Discovery Search Mailbox in OWA, as shown:

Finally we have recovered the message, located at the target mailbox, which by default is the Discovery Search Mailbox.

We can also search for the message using the Exchange Management Shell:
Search-Mailbox "Vladimir Meloski" -SearchQuery "from:'IT Manager'" -TargetMailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -TargetFolder "Deleted message from IT Manager" -LogLevel Full

Restoring the deleted item can be performed using the cmdlet:
Search-Mailbox "Discovery Search Mailbox" -SearchQuery "from:'IT Manager'" -TargetMailbox "Vladimir Meloski" -TargetFolder "Recovered Items" -LogLevel Full

Note: In order to run the Search-Mailbox cmdlet, the user must have the Mailbox Import Export role assigned. This role assignment can be performed from the Exchange Control Panel or Exchange Management Shell.

Once we complete this cmdlet, the mailbox content of the user will have the deleted item restored, as shown in the picture that follows:

Conclusion

Single Item Recovery enables us to protect email items from accidental or intentional deletion. In this article we recovered an item without using any backup. In addition depending on the scenario, restore time using Exchange Native Data Protection is considerably shorter comparing to traditional backup and restore procedures.