Tuesday, January 10, 2012

An insight into Lotus Notes database corruption and some possible recovery measures

Lotus notes is an email client of a cross-platform run time environment developed by Lotus Development Corporation. It offers a range of services to the users, including emails, instant messaging, calendaring, blogs, discussions, and a complete office productivity suite. It stores all application and associated data in a document database format file or NSF file. This file may occasionally become corrupt due to various reasons, such as server crash, hardware issues, resource allocation or configuration issues, improper administrator data access or database manipulation, etc. As a consequence, all your emails, contacts, calendar-entries, To-do Lists, and other useful information become inaccessible. To overcome this problem, you need to go for NSF file recovery through a reliable third-party utility.

Listed below is an error message that is seen in the Blackberry Desktop Manager during its synchronization with IBM Lotus Notes 7.x:

''Database specified does not exist or cannot be accessed.''

After receiving the above error, you are unable to synchronize the data of your Lotus Notes e-mail application.

Grounds of the Problem:
The above error occurred because the mail file directory location possibly contains an incorrect path for the specified database.

Solution:
In order to overcome the issue, you have to update the mail file directory location in Lotus Notes. You need to specify the correct file path to the specified database:
1.Select File > Edit current location in Lotus Notes 7.x.
2.Choose the location currently in use and then click Edit.
3.Choose the Mail tab.
4.In the Mail file location field, choose Local.
5.Type the accurate path to the local copy of the mail file in the Mail file field. By default, the location is C:\program files\IBM\Lotus\Notes\Data\.

However, if you are still facing problems while synchronization, this implies that the Lotus Notes NSF file is badly corrupt or damaged. In such situations, you can use a third party Lotus Notes Recovery tool. With the aid of such tools, you can perform a precise recovery of any corrupt Lotus Notes database to retrieve all your lost emails, contacts, attachments, calendar-entries, To-do lists, and journals.

Stellar Phoenix Lotus Notes Recovery is a comprehensive tool that repairs corrupt NSF files of IBM Lotus Notes 6.x and 7.x. The phenomenal tool displays preview of all recoverable NSF objects and is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, Server 2003, XP, 2000, and NT (SP6).