Hi there, Im coming across a curious random problem during my R6 deployment. Im using a custom upgrade by mail strategy, and a Policy that will automatically replace the design of the users mail file to R6 when the user first connects with a R6 client.
My problem seems to be a random one, in that its only happened 3 times out of the 100+ I have deployed. For some reason, these 3 users have completely lost all their folders during the design replace, including the emails in them. My only option is to manually recreate the folders and restore the messages from a backup.
Im about to push this out to a few more hundred clients and was hoping to stop this from happening again, but due to its randomness I dont really know what to look for/at how this is happening. Any ideas or has anyone else come across this?
Alternatively, instead of doing a Design Replace, try doing a Design refresh - that will not destroy custom design elements like folders but will in fact only modify the ones which exist in both the template and in the target database. It will also add design elements which are in the template but not in the target database. It should NOT touch design elements which are in the target but not in the template.
Thanks for all the useful replys guys. Perhaps an agent may be the way to go here.
With the way Im doing the upgrade, Im not sure its possible to pass different switches to the convert (using a Desktop Setting with “If Running This Version Of Notes: Release 6.0.1, Use This Mail Template: mail6.ntf” and also having the Upgrade the design of custom folders option checked)?
I ran an upgrade on one of our IS accounts, and sure enough, it blew away all but 4 of the folders in the mail file. I absolutely cannot see how that option would have been turned off… but oh well.
Now that I have found the problem, I need a good solution. We have over 300 mail files to upgrade, so you can see, digging through each one myself would be impossible.
There was mention of an agent to do this… anyone have more information about this for me?
I don’t have actual code for you, but here’s a steer in the right direction.
To get a list of all the folders in a mail file, use either the Notes C++ or C API (or from LotusScript, the DBDesign class, a copy of which can be found here (credit goes to Damien Katz)). You can also do this with straight LotusScript, using the NotesDatabase.Views property, but this is slow and likely to eat up extra space on your server because it will build view indexes for seldom-used views.
Once you have a folder name, you can make the folder unaffected by design refresh by setting the notesView.IsProhibitDesignRefresh property. If you have the view design note instead of the NotesView object, you can also do it by adding a character to the $Flags item, but I forget which character. Change this property of one of your folders and compare before and after using the design note properties dialog.
And you can iterate thru all the databases on a server using the NotesDBDirectory class.
The solution to change the design properties to disable design/replace is insane. You best bet would be to use ‘load convert’ on the server and migrate the required mail files using the -s option (check out admin help). From the top of my head it will upgrade the design of everthing except folders/views (as long as you are migrating from r5… r4 will not work).You should also check out ‘load convert’ with -u to upgrade custom folder to the same design of the inbox. So it might be a two step process.
The folders can go away if the “Do not allow Design to update…” setting was not checked. The mails should still be there, though, in the All Documents view (deleting a folder does not delete the documents). It’s too late now to check the Design properties for the missing folders, but that’s what you’d check (third tab).
Hi thanks for the prompt reply. I also thought that the messages would still be in All Documents, but on the one mail file I checked this was not the case, all contents of the folders had been completely removed so its quite nasty.
Ill have a look at that setting, thanks for the tip
On recovering backups of the mail files to restore I noticed that indeed that setting was unchecked. With one user, two of their folders survived and where indeed checked.
My question now is how does this get modified, and besides going through the design of hundreds of mail files can I prevent this happening again?
It gets modified by the users themselves. I’d bet that if you sent out a mass link message to a document showing how to access the design properties, what needs to be set, and that if they don’t make sure they’ll lose all of their old mail and nothing you can do will change that would be all the work you’d need to do. Users can be counted on for nothing else, but the threat of losing an old JPEG cartoon will smarten them up in a hurry.
Ha youre right, losing their “work” emails does seem to be the only thing that phases them. The curious thing is that the people that have had this happen to them arent exactly power users, and I can’t for the life of me see them digging into the design properties of the folder and toggling this, unless theres some quicker/easier way to access it/accidently toggle it than what Im doing?
I think there was a problem with an older R5 version. Folders created in a mailfile with that specific version of the R5t mailtemplate are not checked by default.
We usually run an agent on all mailfiles on the night prior to migration. That agent will set this option for all user created folders.
Subject: the convert program also has a option to keep folders – also private folders can be a problem
I have customers who used this in their D6 migration. Never used it on my own but this should work.
Beside this it could happen that some folders are private (old R4.6 stuff mainly). In this case you are sort of lost. The best way would be to convert private to public folders but there is no easy way to do this but it can be done with some tricks I wrote this for a customer a while ago. It’s a little servertask that can convert folders to public and also protect them (you cannot protect private folders they just get corrupted for some reason).
I wrote this for a customer a while ago. It’s a little servertask that can convert folders to public and also protect them (you cannot protect private folders they just get corrupted for some reason).