Restoring deleted items from Public Folders natively

This morning I had a user call up and say that half the meeting room calendars (which are public folders) were empty. I checked via Exchange Management Console and could confirm that there were no items. However under the statistics for the folder, I noticed that it was showing a total deleted items size.

I decided to check this out through ExFolders (Exchange 2010 replacement for PFDAVAdmin) and did come across a problem as I was getting the error "An error occurred while trying to establish a connection to the exchange server. Exception: the Active Directory user wasn't found". To get past this issue open ADSIEDIT and select Configuration from the Well Known Naming Context drop down menu. Then drill down to Configuration> Services> Microsoft Exchange> Domain Name> Administrative Groups> First Administrative Group> and then delete the Servers object. This can sometimes be left behind from old Exchange 2003 installs. As soon as that is gone then ExFolders can continue (please read the "read me" for ExFolders as it does specify to run the reg edit file and also to move ExFolders.exe to your Exchange location\bin\ folder, which is generally in <drive>:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V14\Bin. It will crash otherwise).

After finding one of the folders that had its content deleting I noticed that at the bottom, there is a "normal contents" and "deleted contents" radio buttons. Unsurprisingly, selecting "deleted contents" brings up the list of deleted items. To restore them it is a simple task of selecting the items, right clicking and selecting "restore items". Bingo the items are back and I didn't even need to get out of my chair to get to the backup tapes. Which is handy as it is in the opposite direction to the pub...