Exchange Mboxes R-Z, "Directory not found..."

[Andronium]

Here's the deal: I'm running BE 8.6 Rev 3878 on W2K Server, backing up Exchange 5.5 on NT4 domain. Information Store and Exchange Directory work fine, but when it hits the mailboxes, it will backup starting with the letter 'A', and usually make it through the letter 'R' or 'S', and then from that point all the way through 'Z', I get the following error for every mailbox:

Directory not found. Can not backup directory ?(mailbox name) [mailbox name] and its subdirectories.

It doesn't die on the same mailbox everytime, and it doesn't happen every night. It seems to always happen on the full backups, but not on all the differentials. I've tried recreating the job definition which didn't fix. I've tried creating a new job that only has R-Z mailboxes, and it was successful by itself. I've checked the permissions in Exchange to make sure that the backup service account has rights to everything, I've double checked all the BE services to make sure they have the backup service account entered. I've reattached to the mailbox selection making sure I use the backup service mailbox to attach.

Has anyone else ran into this problem? I'm running out of ideas.

Andy Koehler

 

[ih8MSos]

I have had the same exact problem. I check the backups often because I am paranoid when using this software. Because weird little things happen almost daily. I am using the same version and revision and I can't figure out why it happens. When I notice the same thing happen I just re-submit the job and it backs up all mail boxes just fine. Who knows, I guess its just this kind of thing that keeps us employed.

 

[Qdog]

The error message you're getting can happen if you are running concurrent backups of the same maiboxes.

But more importantly, why are you backing up your mailboxes every nite?
I can't imagine backing up every mailbox in my organization nitely. You're already getting the stores which contain all the mailboxes. More importantly, Exchange 5.5 has a deleted item retention function whereby your users can retrieve a "deleted" mail message right from Outlook. The default setting is 30 days, so for 30 days, users can retrieve a deleted message. Of course this makes the stores grow. But maybe you could lessen the backup burden by utilizing deleted item retention. Just backup the key users every nite, like the CEO, President, CIO, VP's, etc. Then schedule the rest for every two weeks. Even once a week would be an improvement.
In Exchange 2000, MS extended the deleted item retention to provide the ability to restore a whole mailbox, not just mail messages.

Check out the following Q articles on deleted item retention:
Understanding Deleted Item Recovery (Exch 5.5; Outlook 97-98 ***):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q228934

Understanding Deleted Item Retention and Message Deletion Process (Exch 5.5)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q249680

Recovering Deleted Items from a Public Folder(Exch 5.5):

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q180117

***NOTE: In Outlook 98, the Recover Deleted Items functionality is available only for mail folders (for example, Deleted Items, Drafts, Inbox, Outbox and Sent Items folders). Therefore, items that are hard-deleted from non-mail folders (for example, Contacts and Notes folders) cannot be recovered. However, in Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002, the Recover Deleted Items functionality is available for all folders; if you make the registry change described earlier in this article, you can recover hard-deleted items from non-mail folders.

 

[Andronium]

I'm not running concurrent backups on the mailboxes, so that's not the cause. You have a good point about backing up mailboxes every night, but I doubt I would be successful in convincing my boss of that point of view. Time is a big issue for him, and even for the non-key ppl, he wants to be able to restore any item from any mailbox *now*. I don't think he would go for having to restore the entire store for one item. That doesn't really have much to do with my issue, though. I'm not having a problem with backup size or throughput, just these darn mailboxes failing.