This is a massive issue! Recently when trying to recover an archived mailbox, I was shocked to find only 32 mailboxes (out of over 100) available to restore. After some research I found it’s a known issue with Backup Exec and installing SP2 should resolve the issue. It did resolve the issue – well, sort of.

The problem is, it doesn’t fix the problem retroactively! That means any of your old backup tapes that were used prior to SP2 have unrecoverable mailboxes. To access the hidden mailboxes there is a work around (no fix though), and if you often need to recover archives your not going to be happy.

In order to restore these mailboxes you need to duplicate the backup tape to disk. Once you’ve duplicated the information store/s to a Backup-To-Disk folder you then need to re-catalog the image. You will then see all of your backed up mailboxes.

I doubt Symantec will fix this problem, as SP2 was released June 09 and they are not-surprisingly silent about the issue.

Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 SP2 can be download from http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/323735.htm