EDB Corruption Due to Compressed NTFS Volume

Compression, as the name suggests, is the way to reduce required disk space for a particular file, folder or the entire volume. The one, which is available and done on NTFS formatted volumes, is termed as NTFS compression. NTFS allows compressing of files, folders or the entire volume and thus decreasing their size. Volume compression advantages users to decrease used space of all the contained files and folders in a single go.

Adverse effects of NTFS volume compression have been seen with respect to Exchange Server Information Store which is repository of all user mailboxes and other data. The Information Store service is like the soul of Exchange Server, but NTFS compressed volume may introduce corruption in it. The corruption is specific when the compressed volume of information store reaches the size of 4 GB and hence requires EDB repair.

• Exchange Server attends many users at a time. It helps processing different user requests and writes and so should not be blended in NTFS compressed volume. Compressed volumes can’t handle heavy write traffic for compression and hence doesn’t support heavy loaded servers such as Exchange Server.
• Exchange Server supports transaction logging i.e. all the data is written to log files prior to disk. Now, if you have configured it to store its files on NTFS compressed volume and Exchange Server modifies data via mapped section in a compressed file, corruption may result. The application may create bad pages in database.
• If Exchange Server is using NTFS compressed volumes, the insufficient CPU capacity can fetch problems to EDB. It should have enough CPU capacity which can host compress/decompress operations of compressed volume.

In situations like when CPU utilization gets increased or there exists large NTFS directory, the results may come out as decreased server performance and eventual Information Store failure.

About EDB Recovery

In case, EDB gets corrupted due to the mentioned problems, EDB recovery becomes mandatory to be done. Exchange Server in-built utility, Eseutil, helps removing corruption scenarios, but may fail in several cases and delete those pages which it can’t comprehend. For safe EDB repair, use commercial EDB recovery software. These are the read-only and non-destructive EDB repair utilities which scan and repair corrupted EDB completely.

Stellar Phoenix Mailbox Exchange Recovery is the best quality EDB recovery application. This uses the powerful scanning algorithms to examine and repair Exchange databases. The application is compatible with Exchange Server 5.5, 2000 and 2003 and comes equipped with interactive interface. This EDB repair software repairs all the database objects.

Source: http://www.edb-repair.com/