Lotus Notes: Resolving “File Already Exists” issues

Working in a Lotus Notes environment, I have seen quite a few of the issues concerned with Lotus Notes. Running Lotus Notes with the data-folder located on a network share, combined with sync of Offline folders has a nasty tendency of creating corrupt files.

A typical error is “File Already Exists”. Experience has pretty reliably show this to be a problem related to the bookmark.nsf-file.

The Solution
Lotus Notes has *.nsf files, database files, and *.ntf files, database template files. Knowing this, the solution to this problem is as follows:

1. Find the Lotus Notes data folder (Typically located at C:\Program Files\Lotus\Notes\Data)
2. Locate the bookmark.nsf file
3. Rename the file to bookmarks.nsf_old or something like that
4. Restart Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes will then recreate the bookmarks.nsf file using bookmarks.ntf