Exchange 2003 and renamed mail store files

[murdocmk]

I was recently working with a client and a SureBackup job and noticed that the Exchange 2003 mailbox stores were not mounting. I had both DCs in the job, and everything seemed to be working as expected with those VMs. I checked the event logs and found that it was complaining that the Exchange EDB files for the mail stores were not found within the file system (didn't exist). When I went to check on the location of the mail store files, they were all there but were all renamed with an underscore (_) in front of them. In other words, I saw:

_priv1.edb
_priv1.stm
_pub1.edb
_pub1.stm

I renamed them by removing the _ character, and the mail stores mounted up just fine. I checked another restore point several days prior and found the same situation. The running Exchange VM showed the files with the correct names (no underscores) of course. This seems unusual to me and I can't think of why that's happening. Has anyone ever seen something like this or have any ideas what might be occurring?

Thanks,
Mark

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Mark,

I'm not an Exchange expert, and it doesn't seem to happen for other community members, so I would suggest to address this question to Microsoft Exchange community. Btw, if you run a full backup of this Exchange server does it have the same issue?

Thanks!

[murdocmk]

I need to test that. I'll set up a separate VB&R job of that VM just to run some tests.

Another interesting thing I noted last night -- if I do a Windows guest file restore on that VM and navigate to the MDBDATA folder (where the mailbox databases reside) then the files have the correct paths (no underscore).

On the other hand, if I select the same restore point and Instant Recover it, then the mail store files are all renamed as indicated above. Something during the boot process? Odd, I'll keep looking.

Mark

[Vitaliy S.]

Veeam B&R does not perform any in-guest actions with instant recovered VMs. Anyway I would appreciate if you could update us on your findings.

[Cokovic]

Did you take a look into the windows event log of your recovered machine to see if something strange happens?