Tuesday, July 10, 2012

How to fix damaged Lotus Notes Database Files

Lotus Notes is a client-application program that assists users in communication by providing excellent composing and editing features. It allows the users to effectively manage their electronic mails, and other objects like contacts, calendar events, important to do list, attachments, and more. This email application supports Domino Server which stores the users data in a database called NSF file.


A Lotus Domino application is use a Lotus Enterprise Integrator administrator to send and receive items from database. This program creates special forms, named activities. Main use of activity is to define the criteria for integrating Lotus Domino and enterprise data. The Lotus Enterprise Integrator server associate to external data sources and moves data according to instruction (conditions) that defined in the activity.

To complete LEI activity successfully, the integrity of Notes document is a must. If a Notes document gets corrupt for some reasons, LEI activity can fail giving some errors on screen. One such error is:

“Error: File truncated - file may have been damaged. Connector 'Connector_name(B)', Method -Fetch- (265)"

On retrying the same activity, the below mentioned error is received:

"Error: [IBM][CLI Driver][DB2/6000] SQL0206N "SP1720248"

Further, when you try to open the problematic Notes document in Lotus Notes database manually, another error is encountered:

"Lotus Notes ! Server Error: File truncated - file may have been damaged."

Above said errors indicate that the end of the files has been cut off or missing that cannot be read properly. In other words file is incomplete. Now you have to repair NSF file.

This situation also occurs when you try to access a damaged part of NSF file.

Resolution:-

To overcome this erroneous situation, you may try the below mentioned steps:
  • Execute Fixup command.
  1. fixup -f (this command verifies all documents in the database.)
  2. compact -i -c -d -K (ignore errors, copy-style, delete view indexes, set large UNK table)
  3. updall -R
  • Make a new database in place of damaged NSF file. Since the corrupted document has not been replicated, this will be recreated when you will again perform the LEI (Lotus Enterprise Integrator) activity.
  • Use your previous data instead of corrupted one.
  • Delete the damaged NSF file if possible.

If all above solutions are not enough to repair or recover data from damaged NSF file then go for some third party Lotus Notes repair application. There are many commercial applications available on the world wide. You can easily get any one of them from their official websites. Most of them are coming with free demo versions which may help you to check the efficiency and usability of the software. Download demo version of Lotus Notes Recovery software - http://www.stellarservertools.com/lotus-notes-recovery.php