Exchange Woes

Well, after two very long days and a standard day of fighting our exchange server, I’ve given up. I did manage to get our data imported again and get the server up and running, unfortunately the database is very corrupted and we’ve lost at least half of the email. We went back to the tapes to see if we could pull off the last backup before the server died (the exchange drives were untouched in the crash but the databases were corrupted because exchange didn’t shut down correctly) and found that all the backup tools are reporting the tapes as completely empty. Now I know that the tapes aren’t empty, we retrieved stuff off them no more than a week ago, but try convincing the software of that…. So I’ve given up. We’ll probably ship off the tapes and the drives to some exchange recovery company to see what they can retrieve and we’ve decided we won’t be setting up our own exchange server again. Now we’re outsourcing it. There are (to my surprise) a large number of companies that will set up and run an exchange server for a surprisingly low monthly fee. Access is available via Exchange and IMAP so we can retrieve our data easily and most of them even include licenses for Outlook 2003 for free with your subscription. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me. I never want to play sysadmin again and with this setup there’s a good chance I won’t have to.