recover exchange mailbox items

Hi alanhardisty, No they dont show up in OWA but in ESM it def shows the mailbox as having 597 items, so they must be in there somewhere?

I suppose its going to be back to restoring a backup into Storage Recovery and then Merging the boxes?

Thanks again

Don't forget that items in a mailbox include contacts, calendar items, tasks etc.

Hi alanhardisty, yeah i did wonder to be honest, but, we use a shared 'general' calendar (so dont if this is included or not) and we also have a shared contacts (agan dont know if this is included in the count) and the mailbox is showing only 20 items from 597...

So any suggestions as to what you think the next step would be are most welcome...

I would not be at all worried.  Not sure if the items include deleted items / but the count never tallies and I would not be spending any time on it.

If OWA and Outlook are identical in what you can see - I would leave it well alone.

In Outlook --> right click on your mailbox (left hand pane) click properties and click on folder size and can you put the screen shot here; just want to see where all the mails are.... also try below settings

in outlook--> View tab--> Arrange by--> current view and select messages (check by mistakely if its selected to view only last seven days mails)

Hi prashubvp, I will get the screenshot asap, as for the View thing, well Im fairly sure its not that because she has mail from 2 weeks back showing up...

Thanks for the reply...

Hi alanhardisty, I would prefer not to mess with it, I agree, but I need to get these mails recovered, unfortunately its not optional, I suppose like i say its a storage recovery job and try to merge the old mailbox from 2 days ago with the one she is seeing now?

Thanks again for the input...

You are trying to recover items that don't need recovering.

Create a new mailbox - put some items in it, emails, contacts etc then delete them, empty the deleted items then check the item count.

This will I hope, show you are worrying over nothing.

Hi alanhardisty, you dont quite understand, which is in part my own fault for not explaining it clearly, there were whole lot more emails in this box 2 days ago.

I understand what you are saying about the emails themselves are not in there, this I assume is because somehow the mailbox or the files related to outlook and the users profile have been damaged or removed, thus what she sees now is what she has, as it were  and from that point of view there is nothing to recover.

I also accept  that maybe I got caught up in the numbers pertaining to the items within the mailbox, expecting that they would be in there because the total items is higher than the number of emails we can see. I see now that there is, as you pointed out in the first instance, a combo of items  that are making up this count. I now see that there is no chance those missing emails are in that mailbox, because as you mentioned, whats there is in the mailbox, is showing up.

So this leaves me with, needing to restore the mailbox from a couple of days ago, to get the mails that are infact missing from the current mailbox.

What I am contemplating is restoring the backup from 2 days ago, into the recovery storage group and then attempting to 'merge' the mailboxs.

As ever I would be keen to hear your thoughts on this or any alternative approaches you may have.

Are they not recoverable via the deleted items> tools> recover deleted items?

Hi alanhardisty I will try that option and let you know...

Thanks

No probs. Sounds like they should be there.

Hi alanhardisty, the deleted items only shows a few items from the last week or so, the mails that where in the inbox/sent items 2 days ago are not there unfortunately.

Thanks for offering this one though, I thought for a moment we had a quick fix...

Back to the drawing board...

the easiest would be if you have last week backup restore it...as user has the mails from 2 weeks..so it would be easy fix to the issue rather trying too many things...

Hi prashubvp, ok I have obtained a backup of the .edb and .stm and a log file from last week, I have manually copied the files to the recovery storage group, however when i run eseutil /r, though it says soft recovery successful, when i run the /mh it still shows as dirty shutdown...Any guidance here would be a real bonus right now...

I did run Eseutil with /p then /g then ran isinteg and a /d, the db mounted, but I was unable to recover the mails in question, I suspect the .edb has suffered some data loss...

Any thoughts on the matter, most welcome...

is it possible to restore the database directly from backup tool to recovery storage group instead of manually copying .edb and .stm files??? as you will face the above problems if you do the manual copy of the databases.

also refer the below link for more trouble shooting:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824126

Alan was right the mails were simply not there, it would appear they never made it to the exchange for some reason...