Know how to recover deleted public folders from EDB files?
Public folders provide shared access to data and help organizations to collaborate effectively. They existed on separate Public Folder databases in earlier Exchange versions, but in recent versions, they (known as modern public folders) exist on Mailbox databases.
Public folder inaccessibility issues
Just like mailboxes, public folders also are vulnerable to inaccessibility issues. If the Exchange Server suddenly crashes or the administrator deletes the public folders accidentally, these folders can become inaccessible. This situation will turn out as a major disaster and administrators will find it really tough to restore the public folders. So, it is highly recommended to keep a backup for Exchange database files.
How to recover deleted public folders?
If you restore accidentally deleted public folders from a backup, it will only be reflected till the time server performs replication. As the folder has been deleted from the public folder hierarchy, it will again be deleted from the store. So, the immediate question that turns up is, how to recover the accidentally deleted folders from .edb files?
You can follow the procedure given below to recover deleted public folders:
- Select an existing public folder server.
- Set the Replication registry key (create DWORD key if it doesn’t exist) value to 0 using the Registry Editor.
- Now, restore the public folder database (follow the usual procedure).
- Logon to a mailbox using Outlook client, which uses the restored PF database as its default public folder store.
- Expand public folders if required. And now you can copy the required folders to another location to restore them.
- To make the server live, dismount the database, delete the Replication registry, and mount it again.
After this procedure, the copies of original folders will be replicated in different servers.
How to deal with very serious Exchange issues?
In addition to the accidental deletion of mailboxes/public folders and items, there are many issues like corruption of EDB files that make Exchange data inaccessible. Even technically brilliant Exchange administrators find it difficult to deal with such issues owing to the complexity of the Exchange environment. On such occasions, you can opt for a quick and easy-to-use third party tool EDB to PST Converter which enables restoration and migration of EDBs. It carries out recovery function without requiring any exchange services or log files and keeps folder hierarchy intact. Moreover, it supports all the versions of MS Exchange Server.