I screwed the pooch… deleted exchange 2013 database.

Years ago, someone I worked for did this. I recovered everything. The advice in the comments on how to do so is good, mostly, but the most important thing is: Communicate with your users! Let them know their mail is not going to be available, give them a projected timeline and keep them updated on the progress! It helps to avert the constant, work-interrupting, “Can you let me know when this is going to be fixed?”

Because if you don’t do the above, you will get that every three minutes and it will take you 10x as long to recover.

In the end, in my case, I recovered nearly everything. I think 10-15 emails got lost, which is great considering that company received something like 500,000 per day.

But I was up for almost 36 hours straight gettin’ it done.