A conflict with an antivirus program has stopped messages from being exported

Error code

Product

Applies to

BA1771

BackupAssist

BackupAssist v3 to v9

Description

During an Exchange mailbox backup Exmerge tries to export mail messages from the users' mailboxes. Mail messages may include attachments.

Certain antivirus programs place locks on attachments, meaning they cannot be exported.

There are two main circumstances where locks are placed on the attachments:

  1. The email has been quarantined because it contains a virus, and this means that no program (including BackupAssist) can open the email. To resolve this, you should manually delete these infected emails.
  2. A virus scan is running at the same time as the mailbox backup, or a new virus definition file has been downloaded, which causes a full rescan of all emails. To resolve this, please make sure there are no scheduling conflicts with your backup - do the virus update and scan after the backup finishes.

Three KB articles on this problem have been written by Microsoft.

Note: The Exchange Mailbox Protection feature was deprecated in BackupAssist v9 and removed in BackupAssist 10. To get granular support for Exchange Server 2016, and to use the newer Exchange Granular Restore feature, we suggest upgrading to the current version of BackupAssist with the Exchange Granular add-on. To learn more, see Exchange Server restore

Resolution

Resolution 1 - Delete infected email messages

This error will be generated if there are any messages flagged as being spam or suspicious.Typically, these will most likely contain attachments. BackupAssist will be unable to provide a list of these items or access them due to the Exchange Server preventing access.

You should locate these messages and delete them manually, or use your anti-virus program to clear out infected messages.
If a message is infected and has been flagged, there is no way it can be backed up.

Resolution 2 - Suspend antivirus programs

Temporarily disable the antivirus program for the duration of the backup. Several anti-virus companies have recommended this solution. You can disable the scanner using a pre-backup script, and enable it again using a post-backup script.

To learn more, see our Scripts guide.

We have received strong positive feedback regarding this solution.

Resolution 3 - For error: Possible corrupt PST file on backup destination

This error can be generated due to the source PST file(s) located within the backup directory being corrupt. PST files usually become corrupt if they have reached a specific size limit. This size depends on the format of the PST file:

  • ANSI format is 2GB
  • Unicode format is ~64GB

A PST file can also become corrupted when being used with Exchange MAPI once it has been opened in Outlook. The solution is to move the current PST files to another location so that there is still a copy available. When re-running the backup, the PST file(s) will be re-created and should not contain any corruption.

Resolution 4 - Microsoft's work around

Another workaround has been provided by Microsoft.

Refer to the following Microsoft links for more details:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328642
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/264731
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896671

Last updated

Created

Further assistance

1st Oct 2017

16th Mar 2007

BackupAssist Support page