Good Evening,

I have a couple of users who are saying that they are missing Tasks and Older non-recurring appointments in Outlook.

We are in the process of migrating our storage from NetApp to Hitachi.  In doing this, we built two new exchange servers and created database copies on them.  Last night we activated one of the replicas to be the primary database.  This morning we started getting calls the users with mailboxes on these database had missing items.  It could just be coincidence.  One lady reported that older items from Jan and Feb that are not recurring meetings were gone (although I think we have a policy in place to remove older Calendar items).  Another gentleman called to say that he was missing his Tasks, he had 61 in his folder, but said that was only a portion of them. We do not have retention policy set on the Task folder.

Has anyone seen or heard of this??? I am trying to avoid having people blame this on the fact that a database copy was activated.  I believe retention is set per mailbox, not database or server.

OS: Windows 2012R2
Exchange 2013 CU6

10 Mailbox server (5 active/5 passive)

Each server has 6 databases on them (3 Primary/ 3 Archive)

Any feedback would be appreciated and if did not accurately explain the problem, I can try and elaborate further if need be.

Thanks

Brian Dougherty

So if you have point in time copies from before the move you can use our DigiScope tool with a DEMO license to see if the items were actually within the DB prior to the move, otherwise sounds like a potential policy issue.  That said you should also check the Recoverable Items folder on the current live DB's using DigiScope or MFCMAPI to see if they were deleted recently

Hi Dougherty,

Thank you for your question.

Are there any other issues after we move storage?

Which time period of tasks are missing? Jan and Feb? or recently?

We could login OWA to check if those calendar items are missing or tasks are missing.

After we move storage, was the size of storage changed? We could restart IIS to check we could see missing calendar or task.

In addition, we could check if there are any errors in application log and post them for our troubleshooting.

If there are any questions regarding this issue, please be free to let me know.

Best Regard,

Jim

Thank you for the responses.  We found the issue.  We use Exchange Online Archiving.  There is a registry key that needs to be put on the server to ignore the Tasks and Calendar folders. We did not put it on the new servers.  We were able to restore our users items from their online archive.  Here is the registry key for future reference:

Disable the functionality will cause Calendar and Task Items to expire.  Add the following registry key to your Mailbox servers:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeMailboxAssistants\Parameters
Name: ELCAssistantCalendarTaskRetentionEnabled
Type: DWORD
Value: 0 = Do not process Calendar and Task folders

Thanks

• Marked as answer by jim-xuModerator 6 hours 11 minutes ago

Very interesting so if I understand you correctly your saying that

1. by default this option is enabled

2. when enabled and items are archived they are removed from the source mailbox???

Yes. We found that those folders were being processed by default.

If this is enabled, after a specified time, which in our case is 90 days, the items are moved from your primary mailbox to your Online Archive and they can be retrieved from there. I

I am not sure if you can setup a retention tag for these folders and add to the retention policy, but the registry key was provided to us from Microsoft.

Awesome info, thanks for sharing Brian