Body and attachements in many messages losts Exchg2k

[SuZu01]

I'm currently running Exchange 2000 on a Windows 2000 server with Active Directory. I never had this king of problem before, but now I have almost all my users ( 50 local users here) that lost theres messages body and also attachements have now 0kb.

I deleted many email on the m: because they were hjunks emails, but now that I think about it, does this affects the Exchange Database ? I think so...

Is there any ways to resolve this ? Can I run anything to rebuild the databases ?


Thank you to everyone

 

[SuZu01]

All clients are using outlook 2k, they don't all have the sp3 yet, some are using outlook 2k3

Maybe it's a problem related to the fact that the logs files shouldn't be on the same drive etc... ?

 

[58sniper]

Okay - problem #1 is that you're doing ANYTHING with the M: drive. Hands OFF!

Check your AV software and verify it's not scanning the mdbdata folder.

Worse case is you restore from backup. But don't touch that M: drive. It's not there for administrative purposes.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[TidyTrax]

Yep i agree with 58sniper.

If you want your attachments back - restore from backup

 

[SuZu01]

I don't use the M: anymore, I'll check if my AV software's scanning the mdbdata folder, I think it's actually scanning it, since It's always doing a background scanning of all local files.

I'm using Veritas Backup Exec 8.5 for backup purpose and I wasn't almost sure if I'll lost new items if I was doing a restore from backup, so I haven't done anything.

Should I do a backup from another way for the Exchange server or does Veritas Backup Exec's should be good ?

Thank you, by the way, I'm not the guy who previously done the setup for ours servers here, so I'm still learning how they were working with them...

 

[58sniper]

If you have the BackupExec Agent for Exchange installed, that's the best way to do it.

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)

 

[SuZu01]

First of all, thank you for all your reply here

I don't have a specific version of backup exec for exchange, I known that's it still doing backup of mailbox in the first storage group, but it doesn't backup the database, since he's not doing a dismount before doing the backup of the file. I don't had too much time to work on this theses days, but I'm now trying to take a look at this. Anyways, the problem was that people found that old mails ~ 2 weeks and more had no more body and attachements, so we are only keeping 2 weeks daily backups, so I had nothing to do, but if I had tryed to restore a specific mailboxe, I'm almost sure that it will overwrite any newer e-mails, no ? SO I don't even tryed to restore from a backup since I wasn't sure if it replace the whole mailboxe or only files that was on the backup.
As I previously said, we are using Backup Exec Vers 8.60 build 3878 / Open option Suite.

Thank you again!

 

[58sniper]

No, you wouldn't necessarily lose all newer mail, assuming you recovered the storage group and the logs (the logs go to a temp location, and are replayed after the recovery).

You should get the Exchange Agent and just backup the Information Store - not the mailboxes (AKA "brick level backup")

Pat Richard, MCSE(2) MCSA:Messaging, CNA(2)