I haven't had time to look it up. I will.

Regards,

Michael B. Smith
Consultant and Exchange MVP
http://TheEssentialExchange.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Scott [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2011 1:17 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: Re: Is this a valid file?

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 12:42 PM, Michael B. Smith
<[email protected]> wrote:
>> I don't think Microsoft documents the format of this file.
>
> Just to be a pedant: there is extensive documentation on the
> format of ESE files and their log files.

  I couldn't find anything that talked about the format of TMP.EDB.
Some of the other stuff gets a fair deal of coverage, but that file
wasn't covered in anything I found, other than mere mentions that it
might exist.

  Now, I'm just using a Microsoft site search.  Could well be there's
stuff out there that's not finding.

> Now, that being said, tmp.edb is the NORMAL name for a the file that the
> ESE subsystem is writing and preparing to be the NEXT ESE log. It should
> be created in the same folder as any other *.log files for the ESE database.
> It may not be a valid ESE file because the file is created as a sparse file
> (which means it has garbage) ...

  My understanding of sparse files is that they don't allocate blocks
which are all zeros.  Reading from those blocks should return zeros as
well.  There's no allocation on disk until data is written, so there's
not even garbage to return, so to speak.  That said, I haven't tested
it.  :)

> ... then block-by-block is overwritten with a specific bit-pattern.

  Any idea what that bit pattern might be?  If we knew what it's
supposed to look like, we could know with some surety if the file in
question is legit.

-- Ben

~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~
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