Disaster recovery of an Exchange Server

Last published : Apr 02, 2026
A disaster preparation plan is an absolute necessity for restoring Exchange efficiently and effectively in the event of a catastrophic failure. Because Exchange uses Windows security for authentication, disaster recovery of Exchange cannot be separated from the disaster recovery of Windows.
Planning ahead reduces the time needed to recover.
It is critical to build a kit that includes the following items:
  • An operating system configuration sheet
  • A hard drive partition configuration sheet
  • Any RAID configuration
  • A hardware configuration sheet
  • EISA/MCA configuration disks
  • An Exchange configuration sheet
  • A Windows emergency repair CD
To perform the actual recovery, you will need the following items:
  • An installed copy of Backup Exec
  • The latest full, incremental, and differential backups of the Exchange databases you want to recover
  • The Microsoft Exchange Server Installation CD
  • Any service packs that were applied to the original installation
You can use Simplified Disaster Recovery to recover the Exchange Server.
See Recovery notes for using Simplified Disaster Recovery with Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, CAS, Hyper-V hosts, and the Deduplication feature.
This procedure guides you through a complete restoration of Exchange using Backup Exec. You should have already performed all the appropriate preparation.
Always log on to Windows using the Administrator account (or an Administrator equivalent) during this procedure. Other requirements include:
  • The databases must already exist on the destination server, and have the same names as the original databases.
  • The destination server must have the same Organization and Administrative Group name as the source server.
  • The destination databases must be configured so that they can be overwritten.
See Restoring Exchange data.
To perform disaster recovery for Exchange
  1. Recover the Windows server first.
Ensure that you restore the Exchange Server files that existed on all disk partitions.
  1. From the Services applet, verify the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is started.
  2. Start Backup Exec.
  3. Catalog the backup sets of the Exchange Server databases you want to recover.
See Backup sets.
  1. Run the Restore Wizard and select the latest full backup set of each database for restore.
See Methods for restoring data in Backup Exec.
  1. If necessary, select all subsequent incremental backup sets.
If differential backup sets are to be restored, only the most recent differential backup set needs to be selected.
  1. After completing the restore, it is recommended that a full backup of the restored databases be performed.