Friday, September 28, 2012

NSF File Recovery from Corrupted Lotus notes

This blog’s post is about how we can recover NSF file through default utility and third party software from damaged Lotus Notes database. Several known and unknown errors are occurred in IBM Lotus Notes database while working on it. These errors may affect your working performance and your data too. Some of common errors are:

•    Virus attack
•    Dirty shutdown
•    Human errors
•    Operating System mailfunction
•    Hardware problem etc.



As a result of these problems some errors may occur in Lotus Notes that could be the reason of its corruption. One such error message that may appear on the screen due to corruption is:

''06.11.2004 04:00:02 Router: Shutdown is in progress
06.11.2004 04:00:02 Router: Beginning mailbox file compaction of mail.box ……. In addition to log, below stated error message will also receive that looks same as given below: “The object store note that is used by this note was not found. Run the object store COLLECT task on this database”

On occurring this error, you will not able to work on Lotus Notes database and your NSF file becomes inaccessible. So, in this case, an updated copy of Lotus Notes database can be used to restore its original emails and other objects. This file will be helpful when it is regularly updated by its administrators. In the absence of updated and valid backup, you can execute these commands line tools to fix the corruption and NSF file recovery:

•    fixup -f (This causes Fixup to check all documents in the database.)
•    compact -i -c -d -K (ignore errors, copy-style, delete view indexes, set large UNK table)
•    updall -R

If these solutions don’t work, you will need a perfect commercial NSF file recovery program. Stellar Phoenix Lotus Notes Recovery is one such utility to repair damaged Lotus Notes database and to recover all important data from it. Following simple steps are carried out to recover NSF file:

  • To open software double click on software icon. A default window will open that allow you to select NFS file if you don't know the location then you can click on Find option.
  • After finding NSF file, click ok.
  • You can click on Change Destination option, if you want to change location of recovered NSF file. As soon as the recovery process starts there is no method to change the destination location.
  • To start scanning process for the recovery of NSF file click on Start button. Depending upon size of NSF file scanning time may vary from few minutes to some hours. This time varaition depends on severity of corruption also.
  • All the scanning status is shown on the screen, if you want to stop scanning you have to click on Stop button.
  • As scanning of NSF file for corruption will complete, Stellar NSF file Recovery box opens and shows the details of the entire recovery process. You can click 'OK' to close the dialog box. You can see the preview of the recovered components of the file.