Recovery of a public folder from copy of stm and edb file

[Fozzie22]

Hi,

One of our users accidently deleted a public folder from our exchange 2003 server. Veritas has three jobs to backup 1.System State, 2.ExchangeIS and 3.Data. Unfortunally all jobs were set to overwrite media meaning that only job 3 is available for restore and has been for sometime now.

About a week ago I dismounted the public folder and made a copy of the stm and edb files. My question is if I create a new folder tree and public folder called temp this will create 2 new files. temp.stm and temp.edb.

If I renamed the copied public folder stm and edb files to temp.stm and temp.edb and overwrite the temp files that exchange created. Would I be able to mount the temp pubilc folder and view the contents as it was when I copied it a week ago. I could then move the deleted folder back into our public folders.

Sorry its a bit of a crazy one. Any comments or other solutions would be appreciated

Anthony

 

[pdtit]

Fozzie,

This should do the trick, by creating first the new temp-database files.

However, as Exchange is using transaction log files, you could get in trouble as the same log files are used for both maildbs en publicfolderdbs.

Try creating a new Storage Group, as transaction logs are shared only among storage groups. As such, you create 2 different sets of transaction logs.

I try summarising the steps in short below:
1) create new storage group, in which you create a new publc folder database - named temp
this creates temp.edb and temp.stm as public folder files. It will also create new transaction logs (save them in another directory, away from the 'original ones')

2) dismount temp public folder, overwrite them with your copied files (using same name) and remove the transaction logs for the new storage group.

3) try mounting this copied databases, which should create new transaction logs as well. If not, integrity checks could be needed (eseutil / isinteg)

4) your public folders should be mounted making it possible to browse them from your Outlook client. It should be possible to drag-and-drop them from this temp location to the original one.

Feel free to post back your questions if further help is needed.

Regards,

Peter

 

[Fozzie22]

Thanks Peter for your reply.

I am currently using a program called Power Controls to read the edb file and extract the emails and move them back into the public folder. I have tried it on a couple of emails and it seems to work fine.

I did try to steps 1 to 3 in you post however it failed to mount the temp store. I didnt know about the eseutil/isinteg at that stage and since then I have found Power Controls.

I do have another question though. I created the temp public folder tree however I dont need it anymore. Exchange 2003 wont let me delete it. I must first delete the public folder store associated with the tree but exchange wont let me do this it sais i cant delete it cause the folder contains folder replicas and I need to Move all replicas to another server before deleting it.

I dont have another server to move it to. Is there any other way to delete the temp public folder and folder tree from exchange.

Thanks

Anthony