Dedupe & old Office file corruption

[penfold]

We are moving our file server over to Server 2012 R2 with De-dupe in place and for the most part it is going OK. However we have hit a bit of an issue which is causing us problems with Office files (mainly excel - .xls) We are finding that initially the user is able to open the file, but after they close it there seems to be some sort of corruption which means you can't do anything with the file once it's closed. The only way we can do anything is to restore the original and then convert it to a later format.

 

Does anyone know why this would be the case, or alternatively know of a bulk way of converting files to .xlsx? We are having to slowly move departments because we don't want to move everyone at once and have loads of people report they can no longer access work.

[penfold]

Quick update on this as we seem to be getting a lot of requests to restore files at the moment. Generally this is related to xls file but more recently we have had issues with powerpoint and MS Access files. The majority of them seem to be using an older file format, but there seems to be a definite issue with file becoming corrupt directly after the user accesses it. At the rate this is happening I am inclined to turn off dedup, but I'm not sure I've a)got the space and b)think it's a bit late as what ever is causing the corruption has already been applied.

 

Does anyone have any ideas?

[DCUK6]

Hi Penfold,

 

Did you every find a solution?

 

Thinking about moving to 2012r2 to use dedup but have some concerns.

[penfold]

Nope. We ended up turning it off. I'm not convinced it was a purely de-duplication problem though to be honest. There was definitely an issue with older excel files which didn't happen when they updated the file format. We also had a couple of issues with databases which hadn't been excluded so I would put older file extension in the exception list now if we were to apply it again.

 

The only thing I did notice was that we had started VMWare tools on the server which when done reset the clock to sync with the host. This was out by a few minutes before it re-synced with our network time. I was wondering if for some reason when the files were accessed that the time was out and causing some corruption.