Disappearing Public Folders Calendars

[ITSurvivor]

Greetings all,

I was wondering if anyone has experienced where their Public Folders Calendars disappeared. Here is my issue, we have the Brown Bear Software iCal calendar that we are migrating off of and I have exported three calendars off of it. I imported them into Outlook and moved them into our Public Folders. I've changed the colours and so on this past Friday. So this morning, Monday, those calendars are gone! There are others Public Folders Calendars there, but those remained. We are on a four databases DAG on Exchange 2010 SP2. What am I missing? I do thank you all in advance.


Cheers,

Richard

 

[ShackDaddy]

When you look at all your mailbox servers, do any of them have replicas for the missing calendars? Could be that they replicas only exist on one. DAGs on 2010 have no affect on PF infrastructure, but each mailbox database does point at a particular PF database, so it's possible that the database being pointed at doesn't have replicas for those folders.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[ITSurvivor]

Hello Dave,

I do thank you for your response. The phenomena just happened again in the past half and hour. After those calendars were missing, since we are migrating off of the Brown Bear iCal server, I have the exported calendars on my desktop, I imported them into my Outlook 2007 and them move them into the Public Folders, which I am the owner.

Sorry, I am not understanding your directions for I am not too familiar with DAGS. Came from a small shop that all roles are on a single beefy box. Can you please elaborate more on how I should check. Thanks.

Richard

 

[ShackDaddy]

So do the folders themselves disappear, or all the content in them? When you put your iCal export into the PF system, are you creating new public folders, or pushing all the data into existing PF containers?

It's also possible that this could be a problem with your ActiveDirectory replication: since public folders are essentially AD objects, if you are creating them on one DC but then querying a different DC at some point, and replication is broken, they may well "disappear". I would run "repadmin /showreps" on each DC to make sure that they are able to properly replicate with each other.

Dave Shackelford
ThirdTier.net

 

[ITSurvivor]

Hello Dave,

The whole three calendars, not the Public Folders that housed them, disappeared. However, since you brought up a very good point on the public folders being AD objects, we've recently turned on a 3rd DC, Windows 2008 R2 with expired trial license, and after a while just unplugged the network connection because we started to experience users not able to login. It could've been coincidental that we started to experienced that issue so we shut down the network connection.

Thanks for the responses and truly appreciated.

Richard

 

[ITSurvivor]

Hi Dave,

Quick question, would downing our 3rd domain controller without demoting it cause the disappearing public folders calendars because it can't sync with the 3rd DC? Both the DCs are Windows 2008 Standard and I the 3rd is R2; however, a trail version that we setup last November and never demoted during our busy schedules.

Thanks,

Richard

 

[sircles]

It could still be that the replicas have not been copied to all the PF databases as the public folders names existence are held in AD but the contents are held in the PF databases. Make sure as suggested above that the PFs have a replica in every database and yes the missing AD DC might slow replication or even break it so either remove it from AD or bring it back online.

sircles.net Support - find us at:

http://www.sircles.co.uk

http://www.sircles.net

http://www.ReadAllAboutIT.eu

Henley-on-Thames Computer Support

 

[ITSurvivor]

Hi ShackDaddy/sircles,

I do thank you both very much for your time and input. Somehow the calendars are now staying put. What I did differently was to copy the calendars into the respective folders on the Public Folders instead of moving them. Don't know if that was the fix but wanted to let it sit past this weekend. All is well thus far. Thank you both once again.

Cheers,

Richard