Recovering from a corrupt Exchange data store (the easy way)

Say you have an Exchange server go down and, for some reason, you don't have backups of the mail store. Say further that you can't remount the store. There are many articles from Microsoft and others on magic tricks you can do to fix a glocked store, but it turns out that there's a very easy method that should work nicely with smaller organizations.

In this scenario, Exchange has been completely destroyed and must be rebuilt from scratch.

By default, Outlook uses cached mode for Exchange accounts. All of each user's data is stored on their local computer, in (hopefully) perfect condition. With Exchange offline, go to each user's workstation, fire up Outlook, and export the user's mailbox to a PST. Then bring up Exchange and mount an empty private data store. For each user, delete and recreate their email profile, connect to their Exchange account, and use Outlook to re-import their data from the aforementioned PST. Email has now been recovered.

Obviously this doesn't work for public data stores. But most people are just interested in their emails, contacts, and calendar, so taking care of those will give you breathing room to work on fixing the public store.

As to how I came to offer this tip, I don't want to talk about it. :)