Anyway, the easiest way to fix this is to create a new security group, pop in the members of the group and then grant permissions to the security group on the Exchange mailbox store itself. It is not hard to perform this two-part procedure – it takes nine steps for the first part and seven for the second. Having done this, you can then run ExMerge against the store and it will drop out a set of perfectly formed PST files that you can copy onto the external hard disk as part of the backup regime.
Finally, it was time to tackle the reason why the main backup utility wasn’t working. This can be caused by a number of faults, many of which are mechanical in nature because you are usually backing up to a tape drive of some sort. So the first thing to do is to take the tape drive out of the equation and do a backup to disk. Given that our store was lacking in disk space, the externally connected hard disk came in most useful here. I ran the backup program, but instead of targeting the tape drive I went for the option to write to file and made sure that file was on the external hard disk. Having run a successful backup, even to disk, you will notice that all the log files have been processed and deleted (except, of course, for the current one). Since I would just made a significant change to the structure of the Exchange Server database store, it was wise to take another set of backups, so I stopped the store again, copied out the EDB files, restarted the store and took another set of PST files.
I was now in a position to start doing some investigative work, safe in the knowledge that the core data had been properly backed up and that there was a safe copy of it. You are probably thinking, ‘Fine Jon, but wouldn’t everyone already have done all of this?’ Well, I would like to think so, I really would, but I have seen the results of people not doing this and then turning a small problem into a huge disaster – they have panicked and started poking the server with a pointy stick in the vain hope that something would work.
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