Remember those 5 million missing GOP/RNC/White House e-mails Karl Rove said were gone when Congress asked for them in relation to Gonzo-gate?

I can sympathize. It seems MS Exchange has backups that are designed more for tape tensioning than for actual recovery.

<Seinfeld>It lets you backup your mail, but it doesn't let you restore your mail. And isn't that sort of the point of backing up your mail?</Seinfeld>

But seriously, note to self: first you have to tell MS Exchange it is OK, no, really, it's really OK, to restore a particular message data store. Good luck finding the secret option for that. Then you have to tell it to dismount that message store so you can restore it. Then it might let you restore stuff to that message store. And be sure to restore ht logs and apply them to the restored files. Then if you are lucky you can reattach the restored mailboxes to their users, unless you have SBS 2003 and you haven't applied all the Active Directory and MS Exchange service packs, in which case MS Exchange can't see your Active Directory users or their mailboxes. Or something like that. Will let you know how that works out.

(UPDATE: The key to success, besides installing all the fixes, is that once you restore the old message stores, you have to delete the new mailboxes created for the new users on the new server, then you can attach the restored mailboxes to their rightful owners.)

In other Technology News, the Mrs. had ordered something over the internets and was wondering where it was. She checked the order status and shipment tracking, and it said "delivered." She looked on the front porch, and there it was. That's at least twice this has happened to us. What kind of crazy world is it that you have to look on the internet to find out there's something on your front porch? Sheesh.