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Deleted Item Recovery in Outlook 2007

Posted on in microsoft-exchange • 518 words • 3 minute read
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One of your duties as systems administrator is to design and implement disaster recovery techniques to grant company’s most important data restoration in case of being lost. The most common techniques is to take regular backups (daily, monthly and yearly) as insurance that you never gonna be fired for being unable to recover the big boss mailbox.

Usually, on Monday morning users tend to lose mails and IT inbox is spammed with requests for mailbox restorations. Here is where you, as systems administrator, deploy your best knowledge on data restoration and after two hours recovering data your job is done and you can go lunch.

I’ve done this for ages, bur recently I discovered ‘Deleted Items Recovery’ tool in Outlook 2007; this functionality gives you the chance to spend just 10 minutes for every clumsy user that loses mail on Monday morning.

To be able to use the functionality you firstly need to configure deleted item retention on your Exchange 2007 mailbox database; this can be done from the management console or from the management shell.

Here you have the procedure step-by-step:

Exchange Management Console

  1. Open the Exchange Management Console.
  2. In the console tree, expand Microsoft Exchange, then expand Server Configuration, and then select Mailbox.
  3. On the Database Management tab in the work pane, expand the storage group that contains the mailbox database that you want to configure.
  4. Right-click the database that you want to configure, and then select Properties.
  5. Click the Limits tab.
  6. In the Deletion settings area, enter the number of days to retain deleted items in Keep deleted item for (days).
  7. Click OK to save the changes.

Exchange Management Shell

  1. Open the Exchange Management Shell and run the following command:

    Set-MailboxDatabase <database_name> -DeletedItemRetention 7.00:00:00

Once this has been set, you should see the functionality in Outlook 2007, but I recommend you to do some tricks that improve the experience.

This procedure is valid for items sent to the recycle bin, but if you want to recover hard-deleted items you should set DumpsterAlwaysOn key:

  1. On the client computer used to perform the deleted items recovery operation, click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.

  2. Locate, and then click the following registry subkey:

    _HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Exchange\Client\Options
    _

  3. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.

  4. Type DumpsterAlwaysOn, and then press ENTER.

  5. Double-click DumpsterAlwaysOn.

  6. Type 1 in the Value data area, click Decimal in the Base area, and then click OK.

  7. Close Registry Editor.

  8. Restart Outlook.

Now you have all set to recover deleted items directly from Outlook:

  1. Open an Outlook client that has access to the mailbox that has deleted items.
  2. Select the Deleted Items folder.
  3. From the Tools menu, select Recover Deleted Items.
  4. Select the item that you want to recover, and then click Recover Selected Items.

If you want to review this procedure in deep or need more technical information you can visit the links below: