Recovering corrupt data in MS Exchange Server – What you need to know beforehand

Data corruption is indeed one amongst the most critical security challenges faced by major IT organizations and large scale enterprises, especially the ones that are completely relying on data exchange for managing their overall business operations via MS Exchange Server. If we look at some recent statistics, we all see that considerably large number of users distributed across multiple global locations tend to create more email data to facilitate communication across networks within their own organization & also outside. Thus, the dependency on MS Exchange Server is continuously increasing with the strong need to address enterprise data recovery challenges efficiently while also devising intelligent strategies to handle damaged Exchange Database files wisely.

Recovering Corrupt Data in MS Exchange Server – Things to Remember

So, whenever an EDB file gets corrupted, what do you do? Probably, the first thing that pops up into your mind is to use the primary method of data recovery i.e restoring your exchange database using built-in utilities like Eseutil or Isinteg which is the native recovery mechanism offered by MS Exchange Server. However, such utility commands may not prove fruitful if your database is heavily corrupt or exceeds the maximum data recovery limit of 2 GB.

However, in recent months, I’ve seen many database administrators scratching their head while struggling to recover corrupt data in MS Exchange Server. Very often, I’ve noticed that most of them forget to take care of some important things that should be kept in mind before proceeding to recover corrupt data in an exchange mailbox database.

So, in this post, I’ve put together some of the key points that one must remember while performing data recovery operations either through built-in utilities or using recovery software. In order to avail accurate results & successfully recover 100% of your corrupt data, all these steps must be executed even before you start repairing your exchange database i.e EDB file.

1. Create a valid data backup plan before using any inbuilt utilities or recovery software programs by maintaining a backup copy of damaged EDB file. Making a copy of the database files before you repair them will help you avoid subsequent data losses even if the repair process with Eseutil or Isinteg utility fails to recover your data or the recovery software tool that you are using meets with any kind of disaster.
2. Create some free disk space by migrating non-usable, non-significant files & folders to external storage media.
3. Dismount your EDB files from Exchange database. This will help fast recovery while also helping you in carrying out database defragmentation.
4. You can use CHKDSK utility to detect bad sectors in your hard disk
5. Choose your recovery mechanism wisely especially if you are going to purchase recovery software. Before you spend thousands of dollars to recover your data, you must ensure that the tool you are opting supports database recovery of any size while also providing features for fixing serious database mounting issues. Another thing to keep in mind is to go for the one that also enables conversion of EDB files to Outlook PST format while allowing you to preview the recovered content.

Though successful recovery of your data also depends on the size of your database, the level of corruption and the built-in functionality of the application that is being used to handle errors, some industry popular recovery programs offer the advanced functionality to repair the EDB files automatically without any limitations.

The range of solutions offered by Exchange Recovery Manager includes archiving emails into a separate folder; complete backup, restoration and replication capabilities that facilitate data protection, data management, archiving and recovering critical business data stored in the email repositories of MS Exchange Server.

So, the next time when the built-in database repair solution fails to fetch desired results and does not provide you the expected database recovery results, look no further! Simply create the back up of your damaged EDB files and use to get your corrupted data recovered without any data losses.