How to resolve Notes error: “File truncated - file may have been damaged”?

Lotus Notes is a collaborative client-server software, it can be used as a client in collaboration with IBM domino as server side application. It provides efficient Email management features. It let you effectively manage your mailbox objects such as: mails, contacts, calendar events, and attachments etc. Notes stores its entire mailbox data in .NSF file. The NSF files stores the entire lotus notes data on Domino server. 

If some improper operation is performed on the database then it will bring the database to inconsistent state. Whenever there is some kind of corruption in the file then, its data may turn unreadable and its structure can turn un-integrated or disturbed. The data transaction that couldn’t be committed successfully also leads an inconsistent data state. In such situation the database cannot be flushed properly or it may crash. Further, this leads to serious data corruption issues like various warnings or fault messages while working with the database.

The NSF database can also get corrupt due to a defect or system problem, the corruption can occur at any level .i.e. in the file structure or content.

There can be various other reasons for Notes database corruption.

Common NSF corruption reasons are:

• Improper system shutdown
• Improper database operation 
• Installed add-ons or software applications that can be conflicting with Notes.
• Issues in the Operating system
• network Issues
• Hardware crash
• NSF file header corruption
• Lotus application malfunctioning
• Virus attack

One of the most common errors that Notes users have to face is: Notes error: “File truncated - file may have been damaged”.

You can face the above error in several conditions. Some of the common situations are described below.

Case 1:

You can face several issues while you try to archive your email message/messages to archive file/files.

The most common error is: "File truncated - file may have been damaged" error

Cause of the error:

You might not face any problem while accessing your archive files you can easily open and access your previously archived messages without any issue. The hindrance occurs when you try to archive documents to one of the archive files. Also, you can have to deal with the error while attempting to create a new archive file and archive documents into the newly created file.

Cause for the error is “corrupted archive log file”.

Resolution:

• The primitive step to deal with the error is: Disable Archive logging and then, Archive the data files again.

If doing so resolves the issue. Then it’s clear that the error is occurring just because of the archive log files.

• Delete the archive log file. It will fix the issue.

Case 2:

The other scenario when this error can occur if you have installed Notes on a network share and the data is bring synchronized from  offline folders to the local machine.

"File truncated - file may have been damaged" error

Cause:

The error message indicated that there is corruption in the lotus Notes database. Generally the error occurs because of desktop6.ndk file corruption.

Resolution:

You can resolve the error by:

• Replacing the corrupt file
• Copying it to a non corrupted file
• Deleting the corrupt file and let notes recreate it automatically. 

Case 3:

Lotus Enterprise Integrator administrator is used for sending and receiving items from Lotus Domino database. For the purpose of data transfer from/to Lotus Domino database, Lotus Enterprise Integrator administrator creates special form and named activities. An activity defines the criteria for integrating Lotus Domino and enterprise data integration and the whole procedure and instruction how it will be done. Using the Lotus Enterprise Integrator server data can be transported with external data sources, the process is carried out as per it is defined in the activity.

For successful accomplishment of the database transaction, the Lotus Enterprise Integrator must be correctly integrated with the Notes document. If there is some issue in connecting LEI with Notes document due to reasons like corruption or something else, the activity cannot be executed correctly in such situation.

LEI will prompt some error messages indicating the failure of activity.

One such error is:

“Error: File truncated - file may have been damaged. Connector 'Connector_name(B)', Method -Fetch- (265)"

If you retry the activity, the following error will be prompted :

"Error: [IBM][CLI Driver][DB2/6000] SQL0206N "SP1720248"

If your try to open or access that corrupt/damaged notes document , then the following error will be prompted.

"Lotus Notes ! Server Error: File truncated - file may have been damaged."

The above errors are clearly indicating that the Notes file which you are trying to access is corrupt or damaged that is why it is prompting errors as the read operation couldn’t be completed correctly on the damaged file.

In such situation you need to perform NSF file recovery.

Lotus Notes provides inbuilt utilities for Lotus Notes database recovery.

Resolution:

To resolve the above error try out the given methods:

1. Run Fixup command.
2. Create a new database and replace the corrupt one. When the Lotus Enterprise Integrator) activity will be performed again, the damaged NSF file will be recreated.
3. If you have a backup copy of data before corruption occurred. Then used that fresh data file instead of the corrupt file.
4. Remove the corrupt NSF file.

Run Fixup command as follows:

• First run fixup -f to verify the documents in the Notes database
• Run compact command with -i -c -d –K switches. -i -c -d –K switch are used to ignore errors, copy-style, delete view indexes, set large UNK table respectively.
• Finally run updall –R command

If you find the above described methods insufficient for solving the error then, you will require some potent third party Lotus Notes recovery tool. Such software are enriched with various interactive features and powerful algorithms for efficient recovery of the corrupt NSF database.