Lotus Notes Recovery Kit - Online help

Lotus Notes Recovery Kit (Download) is a specialized recovery tool intended for restoring data from damaged and corrupted files of the .nsf format. The software allows you to perform data recovery on your own, save on expensive and rarely fast third-party data recovery services and generally solve your problem in nearly no time. Thanks to a highly-intuitive interface with a bare minimum of control elements, the program can be efficiently used by users with just a basic level of computer skills and absolutely no experience in the field of data recovery.

If you are caught in a situation where a corrupted *.nsf won’t let you do your work properly and you urgently need to recover data from it, Lotus Notes Recovery Kit will help you get the job done in no time.

Just follow the instructions below:

  1. Make sure that Lotus Notes is installed on your computer prior to proceeding with the recovery process. The program uses some components of Lotus Notes to reproduce the original data structures and save recovered data.
  2. Start the program. The first program screen is where you select the file you are going to work with. This can be done either by typing the name of the file into the central text field or by selecting a file from the list of files you used before. Therefore, either type the name of the file and its path into the input field in the center of the program window or use the standard Windows dialog by clicking a small folder button in the right part of the field. If you’ve already recovered files using the program and need to go back to a previously used NSF file, select it from a dropdown list that can be opened by clicking a downward arrow in the right part of the field. Once the selection is made, click the Analyze button to move forward with data recovery. When the program prompts you for confirmation to continue, answer affirmatively.
  3. Wait for the file analysis to be over. Please note that this process may take a while even on relatively fast computers. Apparently, the duration of this task also depends on the size of the damaged file. Once this process is over, you will see a grid containing recoverable items.
  4. The grid allows you to browse the list of recoverable items, preview them and mark them for recovery. You can sort the list by sender, recipient, subject line, date and presence of attachments. To do that, click a corresponding column header in the grid. When an item is selected, its content is shown in the lower part of the screen. The preview feature supports rich text formatting and allows you to preview messages in a nearly original form. To select specific items to be recovered, tick off corresponding boxes in the leftmost column of the grid. If you want to recover all available items, check the box located in the header of the first grid column. Once done, click Next.
  5. The final step of the recovery wizard lets you specify the destination for the recovered data. This can either be a new database or an existing Lotus Notes database. In both cases, you will need to enter the name of the database. If the data should be saved to a remote sever, use the Server name field to specify its name. If you are saving data to a local database, leave this field blank. Click Start Recovery to save your data. Please note that you will need corresponding permissions (privileges) for saving to an existing database or a remote server. Also, if Lotus Notes is not running at the time of recovery, you will see a standard login/password prompt from Lotus Notes when RTLN attempts to save the data.
  6. The program will save your data and show a recovery log with detailed information about the current recovery session. You can now finish working with the program by clicking Finish or go back to the main program screen using the Back button.

The main program menu contains just a few items: the NSF version autodetection switch, which is always enabled, and two commands in the Actions menu. The Clear file list command clears the list of previously used NSF files. The Send source file command lets you send the currently selected NSF file to the developers of the program if it fails to recover data for any reason. Running this command will open a page in your web browser with detailed instructions on submitting the damaged file and a manual recovery request to the developers of Lotus Notes Recovery Kit. Once the developers receive your file, they will attempt to recover your data using special tools and their experience in this field.

Lotus Notes is a powerful communication and collaboration tool used primarily in corporate environments. With a total of around 150 million licenses sold worldwide, this suite is a direct competitor of the Microsoft Exchange Server + Outlook combo, both in terms of the feature sets offered and the estimated customer bases. The product uses the NSF format for storing both applications and their data at the same time. In fact, this is why Lotus Notes is often referred to as a document-centric system that is not relational by nature, which means that when an *.nsf file gets damaged, its data (and only its data) becomes completely unavailable to the system. Since Lotus Notes is primarily a corporate solution, losing business data may result in dramatic consequences on all levels of the company, from a minor delay in the work of a workgroup to a disastrous stoppage of all activities in an entire department, depending on how strongly your company depends on the data stored in Lotus Notes files. Unfortunately, NSF files are just as vulnerable to accidental corruption as all other files, so if you use Lotus Notes a lot and occasionally experience hardware and network failures of all sorts, having Lotus Notes Recovery Kit always within reach is an unquestionably good idea.