Using Microsoft Outlook you press SHIFT+DELETE to delete a message.Messages are hard deleted in the following scenarios: Hard Delete Type: Happens when a message is deleted by pressing the SHIFT and DELETE keys and it is automatically removed. Soft Delete Type: Happens when a message is deleted by pressing the DELETE key and goes to Deleted Items folder. There are two types of deletion in an Exchange Server environment: hard delete and soft delete.

Understanding soft delete and hard delete in an Exchange Server environment This process can be used together with another Exchange Server backup solution or product feature (Recovery Storage Groups, Restore online and offline). It should be used as a process of recovery, decreasing restore time for deleted items, not as a complete backup solution. This article is not intended to be used as the only way to recover messages. We are going to discuss some ways of how to recover items before restoring the complete environment, which may generate more work for the administrator, or where the user can restore deleted messages without administrator intervention. The most important actions to take when you have a disaster is to identify what situation your environment is in, and get to know the product in order to take the appropriate actions to restore the environment/users as soon as possible and without any problems.īefore we start, you have to be sure that the backup is reliable and you can successfully restore it on your test environment. In this article we will talk about a subject that was discussed on the Exchange Server forums, Disaster Recovery scenarios. In each article we will show the two kinds of settings to be configured: server side and client side. In the second part, we will discuss recovery of deleted items in Public Folders. This article is divided in two parts in the first, we will explain how to recover deleted items at the mailbox store level. If you would like to read the next part of this article series please go to Recovering Deleted Items in Exchange Server 2003 (Part 2).

Exchange online deleted items recovery