About Exchange backups and Granular Recovery Technology (GRT)

When a backup uses Granular Recovery Technology (GRT), users can restore individual items directly from any full database backup. This type of backup can serve both kinds of recovery situations. From the same backup image you can restore entire storage groups or databases. Or you can select individual folders or messages within a mailbox or public folder. This backup can replace the existing MAPI mailbox backup.

You can restore individual items using GRT from the following types of backups:

Full or user-directed backups

Incremental backups are not yet supported.
Local snapshot backups
Off-host snapshot backups
Instant recovery backups, when the schedule copies the snapshot to a storage unit
Replica snapshot backups

This type of backup applies to LCR or to CCR environments with Exchange 2007 or a Database Availability Group (DAG) with Exchange 2010.
Streaming backups (Exchange 2007 and earlier)