This will help any of you who’ve needed to recover or restore a Public Folder quickly because some donut has accidentally deleted it. Plus you don’t have to go back to your Tape or USB Backup.

The Prep

Ensure you have full access to the parent folder, Owner rights will suffice. Bring up Exchange System Manager, go to the Public Folder Store. Right click on the store, and go to Properties. At the top you’ll see a “Limits” tab, click on that and look at the Deletion Settings. Here you can and should enter the retention period before it’s deleted from the server 14 – 28 days should do fine.

Once that’s done make sure you check the box that says “Do not Permanently delete items until the store has been backed up”  This ensures that the data won’t be deleted until the first successful backup has completed. Close those windows now, that part is done.

The Restoration proceedure:

Open up your browser of choice, and go to the Parent of where the deleted folder once was. Right click on it and click “Open in New…” This should open that folder in a new window, (so long as you don’t have a pop up blocker). If you look at the URL address at the top and it should end in ?Cmd=contents. If it does change just that bit to ?cmd=showdeleted and click Go or Enter. You should see a list of the deleted Public Folders. From here you can highlight the one you want to get back, and click the Restore button.

Job Done!
Hope this helps a few of you get out of a sticky quibble.