When restoring a mailbox to an Exchange 5.5 recovery server, install Exchange on the recovery server by using the same logical organization and site names. The server names and service accounts do not have to match, unless you are restoring the directory service database. Exchange 5.5 servers on a site become aware of each other during the installation process, specifically, when you join a new server to a site.

Therefore, you can install a recovery server on the same network with live production Exchange servers, and the two systems will be unaware of each other, as long as you do not join the recovery server to the production site during installation.

Caution   You should not uninstall a live Exchange 5.5 server and then use it as your recovery server while the server is still logically joined to the site—while the server name is still visible as a site member in the Exchange 5.5 Administrator program. If that happens, other servers on the site will try to communicate with the recovery server and may rejoin the recovery server to the live site. Always give recovery servers names that are different from those already on the site, or perform recovery on a network not connected to the live system.

When an Exchange 5.5 recovery server is created, the Exchange directory database on the recovery server has no information about the mailboxes that have been restored to the Exchange 5.5 server database. To populate the directory, and thus make the mailboxes client-accessible, create a mailbox account for each user, with the same directory name as in the live system, or use the Administrator program’s DS/IS consistency adjuster function to create the accounts in bulk.

Then you can use various methods to recover mailbox data, including logging on to the mailbox with an ordinary client application, or using EXMERGE to extract mailbox data automatically to .pst files.