Restoring Mailbox data through Transaction logs

Question

Hello all,
We're running Exhange server 2007 on a dedicated VM.
We're currently running Tri-Daily VM backups and Daily backups via tape in 1 set, and 4 weekly sets of tapes.
Our issue is that now the tape drive has broken and we're trying to source a replacement and or repair of the tape drive, we need to work out how we're going to restore lost data without having to purchase more hardware for VM backups for dailys.
We know that transaction logs can be used to roll forward to a point in time of when the last VM backup was taken, to the time the server went down. to restore as many lost emails as possible.
Our SLA to our users is currently 2-48 hours of lost data on the system, but we'd like to limit this as much as possible, and as it's tri-daily, we run the risk of over running that SLA.
So the main question is, how would we roll our database forward using the transaction logs?

Answer 1

Great link from Ed and regarding rolling logs there are a few things to keep in mind.
1. in order to use ESEutil to roll logs you MUST have a database that is in a dirty/inconsistent state, i.e. system stopped abruptly (was not shut down gracefully) or an Exchange aware backup was made and you are able to restore the DB to disk without rolling
up or mounting the DB.
2. You can only rollup/apply a set of logs to a dirty DB one time, i.e. lets say you have a backup of the DB that is still dirty and the backup was from 1/1/2014 and you have logs up through today 3/11/2014.  So you could then make a copy of the logs
through say 1/31/2014 and use eseutil to roll them up and bring the db to a consistent/clean state.
3. However if you want to rollup data through say 2/15/2014 you cannot do so with the DB that was rolled up to 1/31/2014 in step 2 because that DB is now in a clean/consistent state and therefore it will not accept additional log rollup for the logs through
2/15/2014.  To solve this you would need to do the following;
A: get a copy of the 1/1/2014 EDB that is dirty/inconsistent
B: copy the logs from 1/14 to 2/15 into a separate directory
C: Roll the logs into the DB using eseutil.
Search, Recover, & Extract Mailboxes, Folders, & Email Items from Offline Exchange Mailbox and Public Folder EDB's and Live Exchange Servers or Import/Migrate direct from Offline EDB to Any Production Exchange Server, even cross version i.e. 2003 -->
2007 --> 2010 --> 2013 with Lucid8's
DigiScope