Fidelity Group Recovers 1.8 TB Mailbox Data from Corrupt EDB

Nov 30 , -0001
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Fidelity Building Services Group is a leading integrated building services provider, based in Maryland, United States. It provides services to commercial and industrial facility market in education, government, and healthcare verticals.

facility market in education, government, and healthcare verticals.Fidelity was using Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 SP3 as on-premises deployment, serving 500+ Outlook users with total mailbox database size of 1.8 TB. A majority of users in the organization had been reporting mailbox connectivity issue; Outlook client was frequently unable to fetch response from Exchange Server, and finally it stopped working completely.

The IT administrator found the database in a dismounted state. He tried mounting the database but couldn’t succeed. Earlier, while the database was attached, the admin had logged in a few messages via EMC, indicating low disk storage space — which may have been the cause of email connectivity issue originally reported by users. However, before he could expand storage, the database got dismounted, disrupting Outlook connectivity.

Next, the administrator expanded the disk storage and tried attaching the database but it failed to mount, with EMC displaying Error code:

Operation failed message (hr=0x80004005, ec=-515)

error1

Suspecting this as a case of “dirty shutdown”, he next attempted verifying the shutdown state by using ESEUTIL /MH command, and received the following error message:

“Error 550 Jet_errDatabaseDirtyShutdown”

error2

Having confirmed the state as dirty shutdown, he tried soft repair by using ESEUTIL \ r but the database still remained in inconsistent state (i.e. couldn’t be restored to clean shutdown state). ESEUTIL \r failed most likely due to missing transaction logs.

Next, the administrator restored the database by using the latest backup copy but again didn’t succeed in mounting it, and received the following error message:

“Error 528- JET_ErrMissingLogFile”

Exchange database problem affected mailbox connectivity of 400 Outlook users, who were unable to exchange emails or perform any other Outlook-based operations for 2 days.

Root Cause Analysis

ESEUTIL failed to repair and reinstate the database from dirty shutdown to clean shutdown state due to missing transaction logs (Error 550). Further, database restoration via backup also failed due to missing transaction log files in the backup copy (Error 528).

JET Circular Logging was found as the root cause of backup restoration failure, due to which all transactions that had occurred between the last back up and failure were lost. In JET Circular Logging, Information Store truncates the transactions as soon as they have been committed from cache to the .edb, and hence, the case of missing transaction logs.

Business Need

Fidelity needed to restore Exchange connectivity and reinstate operations by the earliest. It was looking for a solution that could offer 100% mailbox recovery, with minimal human intervention and chances of error.

Solution

Unable to repair the database through ESEUTIL or restore it via backup, the administrator was searching for 3rd party solutions that could solve this problem.

He came across Stellar Repair for Exchange software and used the free trial version of the software to scan and repair the database.

He could see & verify all the mailboxes after opening the EDB through the software, so, he decided to activate the software to recover and save mailbox data.

Having assurance from Stellar’s technical support team on viability, he activated the software and recovered all mailboxes in PST files. Next, he exported the mailboxes to

a fresh EDB and mounted it successfully to restore mail connectivity. Stellar Exchange repair software also helped him recover deleted mailbox items.

Key Benefits

The client was able to recover all mailboxes from corrupt EDB with minimal human efforts and time. The mailbox data was restored with original form and integrity, without any loss of data.

The software recovered all mailbox items including emails, attachments, contacts, calendars, notes, tasks, journals, and public folders, including deleted items. Mailbox connectivity was restored within the expected timeline.