Exchange 2007 Lost a weeks data

[Nick_Parker]

Hi everyone,

 

On Saturday evening, the HDD in our Server 2008 Hyper-V Server died, it's the HDD that runs the Host OS and Hyper-V Server, not the one that actually has the Virtual Server data on it.

 

So I put in a new HDD, installed Server 2008, Installed Hyper-V, Updated etc...

 

I then created a new Virtual Server in Hyper-V and connected it to the Exchange 2007 Virtual Harddrive.

Changed the Virtual Machine's settings to match the old one, RAM Count, Virtual Processors and added the 2 Virtual Network Cards and started up the server.

 

Everything started fine, found the network cards, I assigned the IPs it had before and everything seems to be going fine... BUT...

 

There seems be alot of data missing, people are saying that are missing email, calendar items and contacts that they had added in the last few days and people are also saying that email they had deleted a week earlier had all come back.

 

My understanding is that this is due to the Virtual Exchange 2007 Server not being shutdown properly and the exchange DB has been affected and there is nothing we can do about it?

Am I correct or is there some magic "Restore the last few days stuff" button somewhere?

 

Thanks!!!!

[SC-UK]

Where abouts were your Exchange Transaction Logs stored?

[Nick_Parker]

Also on the Virtual Exchange 2007 Machine

[SC-UK]

Hmmm, how often do you take full exchange backups? The logs are committed to the exchange database whenever a full exchange backup is done. If this wasn't done for whatever reason between a certain point and your system failure then the database will only be restored back to that time (if that makes sense).

 

Exchange doesn't write directly to the database when users do anything, it writes a transactional log. The database can be as old as whenever the last full backup was taken.

 

Tom

[Nick_Parker]

That sounds like the problem right there, I think the last backup was a while ago!

 

A bit off topic, what's the best way to run backups on an Exchange 2007 server?

[SC-UK]

Not giving you a 100% guarantee that my answer was what happened in your case - but I have seen that exact same thing several times before!

 

As far as Exchange Backup is concerned I have always used Symantec Backup Exec - it's not cheap though.

 

I know a lot of people don't like this product but I have always found it wonderful for however you want to back anything up. It is modular (i.e. you have to buy an AD module, an Exchange module, an SQL module, a SharePoint module - or whatever you need).

 

The new version has had a lot of criticism as they have changed quite a bit but I like it even more!

 

Tom

[SC-UK]

As another point - if you have a backup of your transaction logs, you can script to commit them to the exchange database.

 

This does depend on you backing up your "Host OS" though, or wherever the logs were stored.

 

Tom

[Willott]

There used to be a tool for Exchange 2003 called eseutil that would allow you to run repair on a database, and merge transaction logs back in if you need to. If you have a the backup of the database, and can find the transaction logs until the server went down, that may sort you out. - always try on a copy of the database files and transaction logs just in case.

 

Regards

 

Will