Using Microsoft’s Exchange Server you can easily manage your mailbox information’s, like mails, contacts, address list etc. and access those information’s from anywhere. Microsoft has released its several versions among which the latest one is Exchange Server 2010. Since this version of Exchange Server is the most advanced and sophisticated one, so most of the users are upgrading their older versions to this new one. But there are some bugs in Exchange Server 2010 which most of the users are facing very often. One such bug occurs while generating server for your Offline Address Books (OAB) which changes under certain conditions without informing the admin. This issue is very serious one as this can cause loss of your offline address books. In order to get them back the only way is to use perform Orphaned OAB Recovery.

Offline Address Book (OAB) is a collection of address lists downloaded by Microsoft Outlook so that users can easily access recipient information and select and resolve recipients when composing messages offline in a Cached Exchange Mode. Further an Offline address book generation (OABGen) processed by the Exchange Server to create and update the OAB. The generation of OAB occurs during the scheduled time which can be customized or scheduled from the Mailbox Server. This originating Exchange server generates the new OAB files, compresses them and places them on a local share so that it can be easily distributed. Once this file gets lost, then there is no way people can access them from the location they are looking for. So, it is very important to perform the Orphaned OAB Recovery with a goal to recover orphaned offline address books and save them in a safe and secure place for later use. You can perform this recovery using any inbuilt utility or can use Exchange Server Recovery which is a third party utility.