How to recover corrupted folders and missing mail items

(Last modified: 28Jan2003)

This document (10074464) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

goal

fact

Novell GroupWise 6 Support Pack 2

symptom

A users mailbox gets corrupted e.g. from a disk array problem or a power outage etc... so that they are missing system folders e.g. the trash folder or personal folders.

fix

A server based contents check can be run on the users mailbox to restore the missing system folder(s) and any messages that don't show up because their parent folder is missing.

If personal folders get corrupted so they are missing/removed from a users mailbox without the user deleting the personal folder, the items still exist in the users database but are not displayed in the mailbox because the items don't have a parent folder to be displayed in. If a contents check is run against the users mailbox, personal folders will not get recreated but any message items that are linked to missing personal folders will then be placed in the root of the mailbox folder so the items will then be accessible to the user.

note

Specifically I tested with the GroupWise 6 SP2 agents (6/25/02) and found that a structure and contents check issued from ConsoleOne will recreate missing system folders as well as move any message items that no longer have a parent folder in which to be displayed into the root of the mailbox folder. As well, any items that were in the trash folder they will be restored to the newly created trash folder.

A second method to recover deleted or missing items is to use the GroupWise Restore feature in GroupWise 6 see Restoring Mailbox Items.

High level view of this is that the restore can either be started from ConsoleOne where all items not present in a users mailbox that are stored in a backup of the Post Office will be restored to the users production mailbox. Alternatively, the GroupWise 6 client allows a user to restore items while in the GroupWise client. The user can open up the restore area by clicking on File|Open Backup. The user will then get a view of their backed up mailbox that only shows items that are in the backup but aren't in the production mailbox.

The details of this process is first to setup the restore area. To setup a restore area backup of the entire Post Office would need to be restored to a volume on the server where the production Post Office resides (this could be a different volume than where the production Post Office resides). Also, a restore area that points to the restored backup directory would need to be created through ConsoleOne|GroupWise System Operations|Restore Area Management. The new area should have a membership of all the users in the Post Office so that their restore requests will point to this restore area. Once these steps are completed the Restore area should be ready to be used.

To use the Restore area the users NDS object can be highlighted in ConsoleOne and Tools|GroupWise|Utilities|Backup Restore Mailbox can be selected. The Restore All Messages for This User option can then be selected which well send a task to the user Post Office Agent to actually do the restore. Or as mentioned above the actual end user can do an Open Backup operation from their GroupWise 6 client.

document

Document Title:	How to recover corrupted folders and missing mail items
Document ID:	10074464
Solution ID:	NOVL82196
Creation Date:	11Sep2002
Modified Date:	28Jan2003
Novell Product Class:	Groupware

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