I have been tasked with a Data Protection request and need to find any emails relating to a certain user of a period of time.  This includes restoring and searching the oldest copies of all our Exchange databases.  So far I have restored one database into a RDB.  The Exchange Search Indexer has completed its crawl of the RDB and I have a CatalogData folder in the same location as the RDB.

Questions:

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, does the database have to be mounted?

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, will items within the RDB be included?

Is it possible to perform Multi-Mailbox searches against single databases?

Many thanks,

Graham

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, does the database have to be mounted? Yes

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, will items within the RDB be included?   Yes

Is it possible to perform Multi-Mailbox searches against single databases?   No (mailboxes might be on different DB and you would be searching for email with specific subject which would have been fwd to different users.)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335072(v=exchg.141).aspx 

• Proposed as answer by Edward van BiljonMVP, Moderator 12 hours 15 minutes ago

Thanks for confirming.  In that case given that Exchange only allows a single RDB to be mounted at any one time this is going to take me a long time. :(

I found this so might give it a try.

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/forums/exchange/en-US/13377185-e3d4-45d5-8ae4-e08a0706a94f/how-to-do-a-discovery-search-on-a-recovery-database

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, does the database have to be mounted? Yes

When performing a Multi-mailbox search, will items within the RDB be included?   Yes

Is it possible to perform Multi-Mailbox searches against single databases?   No (mailboxes might be on different DB and you would be searching for email with specific subject which would have been fwd to different users.)

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335072(v=exchg.141).aspx 

• Proposed as answer by Edward van BiljonMVP, Moderator Wednesday, July 15, 2015 7:12 PM
• Marked as answer by Birtybasset 21 hours 47 minutes ago

If you need to search multiple point in time copies of EDB's and are open to 3rd party products check out Lucid8's DigiScope http://www.lucid8.com/product/digiscope.asp as it will allow you to accomplish your desired task and more

Hope, the above given suggestions will help you to get this issue resolved.

However, if you are still concerned about searching for email with specific subjects, using Lepide exchange recovery manager would be a nice approach to deal in such situation.