Veeam recently introduced the beta of their new and improved Exchange Recovery tool, whilst they have had the ability to be able to restore granular items from Exchange for some time with Surebackup in real life scenarios it could take longer than you may wish with typical recoveries taking 30 minutes plus to boot the needed servers to complete the Surebackup recovery. With the introduction or Exchange Explorer you are able to simply recover individual items using an Explorer style interface that interacts with the backup of the edb file. 

Veeam have stated in their press release that this tool will work with both the free and paid for versions of Veeam backup which is fantastic news. 

I have been lucky enough to be able to give Exchange explorer a go and you will see the steps below. 

First we start by conducting a file level recovery of our Exchange server (Note that Veeam only support Exchange 2010 and there are no plans to support older versions however I understand they are working on an Exchange 2013 version already)

Once we have select Windows Guest File we choose which backup we wish to restore from

We choose the recovery point either a full or incremental / reverse incremental

After entering a restore reason and clicking finish we are able to use the backup browser to browse to our edb file, once we have found the edb file (Read Update at the bottom) we can select Explore to view the edb file in Windows Explorer.

We now copy the path ready to use Veeam Exchange Explorer

We are now going to select Add Store and browse to our edb file location that we noted in the previous step, Veeam notes that a log replay will be needed and in my case has automatically filled in the log file location.

Once complete we are able browse the edb file instantly and choose which granular items we wish to recover by sending back to the user or by exporting to a pst.

Thoughts and Conclusions 

This is certainly a lot quicker and easier way of recovering granular items within Exchange, if you were to buy tools such as OnTrack to do this previously you would have been charged a heavy sum. As ever I have been left wanting more and hope in a final version we will see the Exchange Explorer recovery item listed in the initial recovery options to cut down on the steps required and I would really love to see the ability to recover the item directly back to the users mailbox as we do with SureBackup today. 

This is a fantastic leap forward by Veeam though and I hope they are able to bring technology like this to other applications, if they were able to do it for Sharepoint they would certainly be onto a winner. 

If you would like to join the beta be sure to register your interest here >> http://www.veeam.com/veeam-explorer-features.html

Update

As Anton from Veeam comments below you can actually double click the edb file in the backup browser to open it directly in the Exchange Explorer, this certainly saves a few steps.