MS Exchange Server, an email server developed by Microsoft, is a contact manager-cum-calendaring software, which being a part of the Microsoft server line of products, runs on Windows server operating systems. Among the various versions of the Exchange Sever available today, Exchange Server 2010 is the most popular one. Nevertheless, it takes immense care to work efficiently.
Just like its previous versions, Exchange Server 2010 also possesses an EDB file (i.e. Exchange Database file) to store user’s Outlook mailbox data, including emails, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, and other valuable information. Since the EDB file contains complete Outlook mailbox, you can actually figure out how significant it can be at the corporate level.
In fact, a single exchange database file may have multiple EDB files. Since EDB files are to be managed by the Network Administrator, he must be aware of the fact that Exchange database files are prone to corruption due to virus and malware infections, carelessness, and many other causes. In case the EDB file gets corrupt, it does not allow users access their Outlook mailboxes and therefore, the administrator has to look for some effective and reliable mailbox repair options.
Fortunately, Microsoft has provided a New-MailboxRepairRequest cmdlet command with Exchange Server 2010, which lets finding and repairing the corruption in specific mailbox as well as in the database. As an administrator, if you run this command against a specific mailbox, access to that particular mailbox is disrupted. On the other hand, running this command against the whole database disrupts only the mailbox being repaired, but other mailboxes remain accessible. Following types of corruptions can be fixed by running New-MailboxRepairRequest cmdlet command:
• Search folder corruptions: The repair tasks use SearchFolder parameter to scan and verify ptagSearchBacklinks, ptagSearchFIDs, and ptagRecursiveSearchFIDs for each folder. In case a folder is not found, it is removed from the list.
• Aggregate counts corruption: The repair tasks use AggregateCounts parameter to hold the active record of count and size of messages in a folder. After that, this computed count is tallied with the persisted count. If any discrepancy is detected, then the persisted count value is updated to match the computed one.
• Folder view corruption: The repair tasks use FolderView parameter to update every single view of each folder and rebuild a temp copy, which is then tallied with the existing copy. In case any discrepancy is detected, it deletes the existing view and rebuilds it when it is requested again.
• Provisioned view corruption: The repair tasks use ProvisionedView parameter to fix Provisioned folders incorrectly pointing to un-provisioned parents or vice-versa.
Though New- New-MailboxRepairRequest cmdlet command is able to fix corruption in user’s mailbox, it may not be able to result positively every time. Well, in case your mailbox or the entire database is severely corrupt, it may not produce expected results. However, you do not have to fret over the issues, as you can apply a professional Exchange 2010 recovery application to recover your corrupt or inaccessible mailbox data. In this way, you can avoid huge amount of data loss for your organization.
In order to get well tested Exchange 2010 recovery solutions , you can visit Exchange MVP’s blogs, Technet blog and forums for more accurate information. Also you can visit mentioned third party resource – http://exchange.stellarservertools.com/exchange-2010-recovery.php