How a Recovery Storage Group Differs from an Ordinary Storage Group

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A recovery storage group is similar to an ordinary storage group. However, several of the features and functions of an ordinary storage group have been disabled for recovery storage groups. These changes were made to minimize the performance overhead of a recovery storage group, to prevent problematic interactions between the recovery storage group and the rest of the Exchange organization, and to minimize the likelihood of errors in configuring the recovery storage group.

Recovery storage groups differ from ordinary storage groups in the following ways:

  • All protocols except MAPI are disabled. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), Remote Procedure Call (RPC), X.400, Post Office Protocol version 3 (POP3), and IMAP4 are all unavailable for databases in a recovery storage group. As a result, mail cannot be sent to or from a database in a recovery storage group. This prevents the recovery storage group from inserting mail into or removing mail from your Exchange system.

  • User mailboxes in a recovery storage group cannot be connected to Active Directory accounts. As of this writing, the only supported interface for accessing mailbox contents in the recovery storage group is the Exchange 2003 version of ExMerge.

  • System and mailbox management policies are not applied. This prevents items in the recovery storage group from being deleted by the system as you are trying to salvage them.

  • Online maintenance and defragmentation do not run against databases in the recovery storage group, thus eliminating the effect of such intensive operations on server performance.

  • Databases in a recovery storage group cannot be set to mount automatically when the Microsoft Exchange Information Store service is started. An administrator must always start the databases manually. If mounted at the time of a cluster failover, databases will not restart automatically after failover completes.

  • There is no support for changing data paths or moving data files after initial creation of the recovery storage group. You can delete and re-create the recovery storage group to change paths, or move files manually to desired locations.