Exchange restore from a Tape device may fail with error “0xe00003be - Cannot open one or more mail messages because of unknown errors reading data from the EDB file. Review the job log for more information.”

Problem

Exchange restore from  a Tape device may fail with error “0xe00003be - Cannot open one or more mail messages because of unknown errors reading data from the EDB file. Review the job log for more information.”

Error Message

“0xe00003be - Cannot open one or more mail messages because of unknown errors reading data from the EDB file. Review the job log for more information.”

Cause

This happens when the Exchange server gets backed up by multiple backup jobs with an interleaved schedule, which causes the missing of Exchange transaction logs files during incremental backup. Since the backup is happening on a Tape device, the problem cannot be detected during backup, because Backup Exec is not able to detect the missing transaction logs after backup without mounting the Exchange database.
 

Solution

Always use a single backup job to backup Exchange database. Do not backup the same Exchange server using two different backup jobs. This is applicable to Virtual backup as well as agent-based backup used for Exchange backup.

Workaround:

Please try restoring backwards from the most recent incremental backup set, until the restore succeeds and shows the expected details.

It is visually challenging to find the missing log sequence due to multiple backups of the same database. Hence, as best practice, we recommend users to follow this recovery approach.