The main purpose of an Exchange server is to function as a centralized system for managing the company’s email services, archives, contacts and calendar appointments. It allows your employees to log in and check their emails from anywhere, be it their work desk, at home or while on the move via mobile or tablet device.
Although Exchange servers are designed to be robust, it is important to ensure they are subject to regular backups, as a failure of the server could leave everyone in your company without access to their email, contacts and calendar. The effect upon the company after such a failure can be severe, with the inability to check emails and access other important information, it could bring their work to a halt. In the event of a failure it should be possible to restore the backup with little or no loss of data in the shortest possible time frame.
Should your company not have an adequate backup or it fails to restore, Exchange server recovery will be required. It is important that this restoration procedure is not attempted on the failed server, as it could result in a severe loss of data if the process fails. Exchange server failures can happen as the result of physical problems or logical corruption, causing the server not to work correctly.
It is important to diagnose the cause of the failure, which our data recovery specialists will determine. Any physical failure of a hard disk or RAID array can be recovered, which will in most cases allow the Exchange database to be restored to a usable state.
It is important that the integrity of the recovered database is checked. If this fails, or the failure was the result of a logical problem, our in-house Exchange recovery solutions are used to extract all individual records from the “priv.edb” and “pub.edb” files, which can then be rebuilt into mailboxes. These individual mailboxes can then be imported into the Exchange server.
Some of the more common failures which can occur are listed below:
- Exchange Server Failure
- Hard disk or boot failure
- Server or RAID controller failure
- Corruption of transaction logs
- Jet Database Engine Errors
- Deleted emails
- Damaged or corrupt information stores
At one time a common problem was exceeding maximum storage capacity, which could cause the server to fail. These issues have been addressed in more recent versions, making this an unlikely scenario. If your Exchange Server fails, you should power it down and seek advice by contacting DiskEng Exchange Server Recovery to talk with an Exchange data recovery specialist who can guide through our recovery processes.