Hi All,
We recently had a support case where an Exchange 2003 Server simply wouldn’t back up with NTBackup. The error in the NTBackup log was:
The ‘Microsoft Information Store’ returned ‘Backup is already active.
‘ from a call to ‘HrESEBackupSetup()’ additional data ‘-‘The ‘Microsoft
… Information Store’ returned ‘Functions called in an invalid sequence.
‘ from a call to ‘HrESEBackupClose()’ additional data ‘-‘
In the event log, there were errors such as this:
Information Store (9880) Callback function call ErrESECBPrepareInstanceForBackup ended with error 0xC7FE1F45 Instance not found
Our client was confused as to why he could perform an image backup on his computer (using a different product) but not backup Exchange using BackupAssist.
We did integrity checks on the databases using isinteg and eseutil but they showed nothing strange.
Eventually, we worked with him to rebuild the pub and priv1 databases, and this reportedly fixed the issue.
Excerpts from my support emails with our client are included below, in case anyone else runs into the problem.
The reason why imaging backups would work is because when doing an image, there is no consistency check done on the database, like there is with a streaming backup (which is the kind that NTBackup does). An image will capture the corrupted edb files, and not tell you that there is a problem. Some imaging products won’t notify the Exchange VSS writer (which incidentally is disabled on SBS2003 by default) so logs won’t get truncated either.
I hope this helps if anyone else runs into weird errors when backing up Exchange Server.
Regards,
Linus
Have you seen in this article – they have a diagnosis procedure based on eseutil:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313184
If the eseutil steps don’t yield any results, then it might be best to recreate the public folder store.
I have been reading up on the best way to do it (whether it’s better to use a tool, or manually) – and it looks like the best thing to do is to simply open up the public folders in Outlook, drag and drop them to a new PST file. Then create a new public store (dismount the old one, rename the old pub1.edb and pub1.stm files, create new files, and moutn the database), set permissions back on the public store, and copy the data back.
Detailed instructions are given at the same MS KB article:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/313184
2 thoughts on “Exchange Server Database corruption can prevent backups from completing”
Hi,
I’m a happy user of backupassist on a windows 2003 server with exchange 2003 but I’m planning to migrate to windows 2008 with exchange 2007 soon, can you tell me if this:
>The reason why imaging backups would work is because when doing an image, there is no consistency >check done on the database, like there is with a streaming backup (which is the kind that NTBackup >does). An image will capture the corrupted edb files, and not tell you that there is a problem.
is true with exchange 2007 SP2 ?
Here (http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/05/13/451311.aspx) there’s a post from Microsoft where it seem that there are some checks even if you use “windows server backup” on a win2008 with exchnge 2007?
thanks for your time!!
Hello Gabriele,
Thanks for the link. It certainly looks like MS are putting in the consistency check plug-in in SP2.
The information you pasted is true for Exchange 2007 RTM and SP1, but BackupAssist has its own plug in that will correctly back up those versions of Exchange 2007.
It looks like the Microsoft plug-in in SP2 will do something very similar to the BackupAssist plug-in.
We will probably keep the BackupAssist plug-in for the time being, and when SP2 ships, we’ll have a look at Microsoft’s plug-in and see if we should use their plug-in, or our own. However, I know that the Microsoft plug-in does not report the verification of the Exchange databases, so we may continue to use our own.
Thanks for your comment!
Regards,
Linus