Missing folder on exchange

anything I don't mind · 30 May 2012 at 12:00

A user has said that he has lost a folder from his inbox and it is not in his deleted items and not in his recover deleted items and i have checked for drag and drop mistake. Has anyone experienced this sort of magic vanishing folder before ? The guy is very computer illiterate, his story goes that he logged on to another pc (no roaming profiles) then he did not see the folder in question. So the next day when he went back to his normal pc it was there but when he clicked on it, it came up with an error then it magically vanished. Sounds like a load of BS to me.

How would i go about recovering this from backup? The only way i can think of is restoring the entire exchange server from backup and then connecting to the mailbox and copying out the emails. Is there a better/easier way?

Baz · 30 May 2012 at 12:16

I have seen items go missing before, usually due to the way Outlook was configured, where it delivers everything to an offline folder.

Log back on the second computer, and find out the delivery location within the account settings, if that is the case, the items can be copied back.

Failing that, if the user used Shift+Delete, it's gone except from backups.

anything I don't mind · 30 May 2012 at 13:11

Thanks for response but still no luck. the guy has basically said forget about it because i explained that it will be a lot of work to recover. Very odd one.

tribz · 30 May 2012 at 13:46

Have you checked any of his other folders. Quite often its an accidental click and drag without realising they've done it.

When he went back to his normal PC, it might have shown initially and then moved as the offline cached file updated.

edscdk · 30 May 2012 at 13:52

I have never seen exchange filders vanish, other than by user error.... it may have auto-archived, however it would have left an empty folder behind...

my bet would be the user actually did delete it and forgot....

the only thing worth trying is connect to his mail box from a different PC and dont enable cache mode to ensure you are looking directly at the mail box and not a cached copy on the local hard drive

Sp00n · 30 May 2012 at 13:56

groen said:
How would i go about recovering this from backup? The only way i can think of is restoring the entire exchange server from backup and then connecting to the mailbox and copying out the emails. Is there a better/easier way?

If you have the exchange agent for Backup Exec you can restore individual folders/emails within a users mailbox.

anything I don't mind · 30 May 2012 at 13:57

Yea i connected with OWA and could not locate it.

anything I don't mind · 30 May 2012 at 14:08

They do use backup exec but when i go to the job from last week, it just wants to recover the entire mailbox store in question. It does not give an option to restore specific folders.

Rangler · 3 Jun 2012 at 08:44

Seen this before whereby either a corrupt OLK rule can inadvertantly hide messages (even within OWA) and also folders mysteriously moved into the Top of Information store within the users mailbox.
Have a look for MFCMAPI and read some of the tuts on removing stale OLK rules and recovering missing folders.

BEWARE though its a very powerful tool with the possibility of screweing up the mailbox completely if you get it wrong.

If you get stuck give me a shout.

MasterPlan1 · 3 Jun 2012 at 09:25

Look at enabling GRT backups, it'll make it a lot less hassle in the future.

Knubje · 3 Jun 2012 at 14:18

edscdk said:
I have never seen exchange filders vanish, other than by user error.... it may have auto-archived, however it would have left an empty folder behind...

my bet would be the user actually did delete it and forgot....

the only thing worth trying is connect to his mail box from a different PC and dont enable cache mode to ensure you are looking directly at the mail box and not a cached copy on the local hard drive

+1 one to this. So many times calls escalated with "Has exchange done something odd to the users mailbox, they swore they had an item in there but its gone".

...yeah, Microsoft designed a product which has been in use for quite some time - and just for the lols, they snuck in some random auto delete features on users mailbox...

Groen, the folder itself may appear in deleted items but when you delete a folder from deleted items - it doesn't retain the folder in recover deleted items (assuming you're on Exchange 2010), it only has the items from the folder. This is a pita for my organisation and I'm annoyed with Microsoft for changing this...but I digress.

The best thing to do now would be to restore his mailbox from when he knew it was there if you have a backup around that time. You could also look into single item recovery and just restore his mailbox into another one to check the contents, this covers anything that has ever been marked for deletion from his mailbox up to a set limit (if you have it enabled). It would also mean not having to restore an entire database just in order to get his data back.

MFCMAPI is a very good idea although you do have to be careful when having a poke around in his mailbox.

The chances are this is going to be related to a rouge mail client ****ing things up, a smart phone sync gone wrong, etc.

I'd be interested to see what the cause was though!