Back againnn! - SBS 2008 Public/shared folder - security permissions and .ost file recovery

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Back againnn! - SBS 2008 Public/shared folder - security permissions and .ost file recovery - SOLVED

Hey guys, I am getting totally confused again and am once more seeking your aid.

I have two main problems:

Problem number one -

Ok so our servers backups have been failing for the last three months (before I took control of IT) and no one had realised, after spotting this we tried to do various backup methods but all have failed (symantec backupexec and SBS backup wizard) - we are moving to sharepoint soon but until we are ready to migrate to sharepoint we are backing up our data on an external HDD - last night we literally selected the whole public folder and copy/pasted it into the SSD, everything transferred fine.

Problem is, no idea why, it seems to reset ALL the security permissions on shared data, so today all I've had is people saying "I can't access my public folder?"

I'm not fully trained to be doing this, otherwise I wouldn't be asking here, but I'm the only person that can do this in the company. I was wondering if someone could just teach me how this whole security thing works, like, advanced permissions, inheriting permissions from folders, applying to subfolders etc.

I just need it so everyone can access the public folder, but only certain people can access their folders (some people need access to other peoples folders too).

This all seems fairly self explantory on the face of it, but it seems that I am getting permission denied when I try and change settings on certain folders etc, it seems that somewhere in the hierachy, some folders are taking settings/permissions from parent folders.

This is how the system is structured:

Server -> Data (E) -> Users -> Public->

-User 1
-User 2

etc etc

Can someone tell me the best way to reset everything and restructure security so everyone can access public but only certain people can access certain folders? <3

Second problem is (I have another post about this subject).

Basically we have migrated to office 365, and last thursday night we exported everyones (or so we thought) .pst file from their outlook folder, created a new mail account with their new credentials for office 365, and imported the pst back into the new profile.

The next day our 365 specialist from Vodafone came in to try and smooth over problems, (ie mail bouncing from cached email address and our local exchange server still trying to get involved etc) and it was determined (I had no input to this cause I didn't know why) that we had to remove exchange 2007 from our sbs 2008 server, and from what I've heard from my other posts on here, this was very bad.

So basically, removing exchange 2007 for some reason, totally removed EVERYONE'S domain account from the SBS console and no one could logon (the users that were already logged in were ok, some kind of local copy of the profile I guess) so we had to fully recreate everyones accounts on sbs and locate all their files on the server and restore them to the new profiles we created then resync their outlooks to the exchange server. (this is where all the other problems started occuring).

Problem is, I didn't realise, but we had a person on maternity leave that had used the same PC as one of our current users. So it completely went over my head to logon to their account on the thursday and export their pst file too.

As I mentioned I basically recovered everyones documents, but didn't have to worry about the emails because they were already on excahnge. It wasn't until today we realised that the person who is on maternity leave didn't have their old emails, cause we hadn't exported a pst file and we hadn't reimported it into exchange.

As nothing was intentionally deleted I don't see why we couldn't recover it, but does anyone know how I could find the user (who is on maternity leave) outlook backup file (.ost)? Where would it be stored and can anyone think of how we could recover it? Would it be stored locally on the C: drive of the PC she used to use?

Any ideas would be amazing, I'm desperate for help here. <3

Jamie
 
Last edited:
No answers :P but I'm very glad that last minute before leaving work last night my memory was jogged and I found the missing .ost files! I basically did a dance I was so relieved, so just in case anyone else ever has this problem, or someone in the same situation as I was decides to google it, I'll put the solution on here :)

It was actually the simplest thing ever..

So basically outlook stores a backup version of each inbox it uses into a hidden file normally around this directory - C:\Documents and Settings\accounts\Local Settings\Application Data
\Microsoft\Outlook

So it's only visible when folder options are set to view hidden folders and files, which is why I hadn't seen it before!
Next I opened command prompt, CD.. twice to get me back to C: root then ran this command - "C:\>dir /s *.ost"

within seconds it showed me the locations of all the hidden ost files on the system and I used windows explorer to follow the root and locate the missing file, Hooray!

All that remains now is to try and convert it without spending a fortune on a converter!
 
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