Repair Exchange

Truly a dynamic tool for corporate email and scheduling, Microsoft’s Exchange Server has been a boon to organizations practically from day one, as both a collaboration toolset, and as a communication super tool. Currently in the Microsoft Exchange 2010 iteration (as of this writing), corporate IT departments worldwide depend on this robust system for mission critical data of all kinds.

But what about when Exchange fails? What happens when your Exchange database is corrupted? Do you have a plan in place? Can you repair your Exchange server quickly, without causing excessive downtime?

Using ESEUTIL

What would a somewhat expensive corporate communication tool be without its own repair utility? Probably an expensive nightmare. Fortunately, MS Exchange repair can be performed with a relative level of ease using the ESEUTIL program.

But on the other hand, what many administrators do not realize about ESEUTIL is that its “repair” process does not guarantee that data will not be lost. In fact, what ESEUTIL does is “drop” pages it deems corrupted from the database, which virtually GUARANTEES data loss.

What To Do With A Corrupt .EDB

Frankly, if your company has a solid, effective backup process with daily backups, you may not need to repair Exchange using ESEUTIL. The fact is, a few lost emails may not make a difference in the long run, and certainly using the ESEUTIL tool to fix your priv1.edb file can mean far worse data loss than simply the day’s emails.

So if you can just restore a backup, it is likely to be your best choice. If not, you may want to get in touch with Microsoft. You may be in for a long road ahead.

Repairing Exchange with Failed Hard Drive

One of Hard Drive Recovery Group’s specialties is repairing Microsoft Exchange Servers of all iterations, particularly when a hard disk drive has failed. As part of our commitment to corporate customers of all sizes, our technicians are continuously trained in Exchange repair and recovery techniques.

When we recover and repair Exchange servers, we always capture an image of all the data, including .edb and .stm files, to work directly with. This ensures that all data remains intact, and that the source disk is not used.

RAID and Exchange

Our RAID recovery engineers have developed proprietary techniques to repair exchange servers saved on RAID arrays. We have recovered hundreds of MS Exchange databases from RAID arrays, which are decidedly more complicated to deal with than simple single hard drive solutions.

Naturally, RAID and SAN appliances are the typical platform for serious IT users, so when trusting the repair of your Exchange server to an outside service, it is always critical that you verify their experience with RAID data recovery. Because the data in an Exchange Server is mission critical, this is the one place where “going cheap” is liable to find you with real problems.

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