PST Hell

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nitrobass24

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - December 2009
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OK so here is my issue.

I have multiple computers but i primarily use my laptop and my desktop which connect to my company's LAN via SSL VPN.

I have outlook configured on both and on my iphone and the calendars, contacts, and mailboxes all sync great. The problem is my mailbox size is limited 150mb and i regularly deal with large emails that i have to save for legal purposes. Right now i have about 5 PSTs and two of them are 2+gb, so they can get large.

Right now i keep them on my laptop and archive old ones and they are backed up to a network share on the corp LAN.

At any given time i need access to 2-3 PSTs, but i can only access them on my laptop.

Is there anything that will allow me to sync(dropbox like without cloud storage) these over the internet? At a minimum i would like to sync to my Desktop, but if i could sync 1 or two PSTs to my iPhone that would be really cool.

I tried Windows Live Mesh but it doesn't like PSTs:(
 
Maybe set up a private IMAP or Exchange server protected by VPN and/or connected to with SSL and move the stuff you want to archive over to that account. No quota, and easily accessible via a large variety of methods.
 
I cant do a private exchange cause i can only be connected to one exchange server in Outlook but I like the idea of a private/hosted IMAP.

Can you explain a bit more of what you mean?
 
Speak to your IT and your legal department and make it their problem.

If you have to keep them for legal purposes but can't do so with the storage they're giving you, they need to fix it.
 
hutchingsp said:
Speak to your IT and your legal department and make it their problem.

If you have to keep them for legal purposes but can't do so with the storage they're giving you, they need to fix it.
Click to expand...

This!
150 meg limit, but you need to save lots of e-mail with attachments for legal purposes? Whoever implemented that 150 meg limit on the Exchange server needs to be canned and delegated to a gas station attendant job or washing dishes at a restaurant.

Seriously...if you're stuck trying to wrestle with 5x PST files for the sake of performing your job at this company....whoever is trying to be the IT person there is failing the company miserably.

PST's are nasty complicated files...I can't think of any replicating software that would work smoothly, and the PSTs will most likely corrupt on you frequently.

If you have VPN to the office, can you RDP to your workstation at the office? Keep 'em all there...and hopefully a more proper Exchange setup can happen in short time.
 
Yea 150mb is low but when you have 130k employees that's a ton of space for just exchange.

I can put the PSTs on a flash drive, but i was just hoping there would be something more elegant.
 
150MB mailboxes are actually rather large for a company that size. The last place I was at let everyone have unlimited space and we had guys with 40GB+ mailboxes. Try telling an attorney he can't have his email from 2000. Until we implemented Enterprise Vault it was a shitshow. YeOld, you've been in the SMB market for too long. ;)
 
QHalo said:
150MB mailboxes are actually rather large for a company that size. The last place I was at let everyone have unlimited space and we had guys with 40GB+ mailboxes. Try telling an attorney he can't have his email from 2000. Until we implemented Enterprise Vault it was a shitshow. YeOld, you've been in the SMB market for too long. ;)
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150MB is big? Really? I have a 250GB virtual Exchange server just for my emails >_<
 
How many people in your organization and how many others have mailboxes that size? I bet its not 130k like the guy above stated.
 
Yeah I doubt it's a 130k person legal firm, HIGHLY doubtful that all 130k need to keep 5 PSTs worth of emails for legal reasons, and not EVERYBODY in an exchange organization has to have the exact same mailbox limits... So yeah if you need to keep them for company legal reasons, hit up whoever controls your exchange server, tell him to go open the exchange management console, go to recipeient configuration, mailboxes, right click your name, properties, mailbox setttings, double click storage quotas, uncheck use mailbox database defaults and add at least 2 zeroes behind all of the storage limits there.
 
nitrobass24 said:
Yea 150mb is low but when you have 130k employees that's a ton of space for just exchange.
Click to expand...

Yes it's low, but if you need to keep the emails for legal reasons in the course of your business, and I mean legal reasons, not just because you want to keep them, then your company is being grossly negligent if they're leaving it to you to archive them the PST and have them rattling around on your home PC, USB, dropbox or goodness knows what.

If you need to keep them for legal reasons your company should be putting in place a means for you to do just that, and respectfully that's what you should be tackling and making them aware of.

Sorry as I'm sure I sound preachy, but hopefully you'll see the reasons for it.
 
Hey guys just a thought here. In the places we have to keep emails for legal purposes we have an email vault. Every email that gets delivered also gets copied to the vault. Maybe your IT department already does this & your being redundant.
 
Every computer is backed up nightly including workstations, and laptops so its not like they are at risk of being lost but we are not allowed to delete them.

for example if i go do work for client X and they are in the middle of a purchase price dispute my emails between me and company X are now subject to discovery so i delete them I put my firm at risk.

Anyways its not the company's problem and with a multinational company, its not like i could do anything to get them to change it. They have decided this is what they are doing and thats that.

The issue never was a space issue, it was using a PST on multiple devices.
 
enuro12 said:
Hey guys just a thought here. In the places we have to keep emails for legal purposes we have an email vault. Every email that gets delivered also gets copied to the vault. Maybe your IT department already does this & your being redundant.
Click to expand...

This is why you're not putting your firm at risk. After an organization reaches a certain size, you can basically be sure they'll have something like this in place.

I've seen in most orgs, you have 75% of users with a small quota (128-256M), 15-18% with a moderate size (2-4GB) and then the remaining percentage with either very high or unlimited quotas. (I'm currently thinking of a 20K-user organization.)

I agree with an earlier poster that you should be able to request a larger quota. Honestly if you're moving PST files around, presumably you're using your archives.. that sounds like a prime reason to have the stuff online if you're working from it.

But yeah, failing that, set up a private server and move mail into it. Just be mindful that there could be policy in place that you need to adhere to as far as company data and .. yadda yadda.
 
marley1 said:
What do you use for email vault archiving
Click to expand...

The key is to have a policy and follow it, and ensure your policy covers whatever standards it needs to for the organization. Public company with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements might have a full system that indexes and writes archives to WORM tape, with a bunch of controls and internal audit procedures. Or maybe the recommended practice is to have a stated archival period which is strictly adhered to, for example retention of, and only of, the last 6mo, 1y, whatever time period, actively rolling the window to delete archives older than a date, but with lighter control requirements (not that they wouldn't be important, just that there isn't a policy that is externally mandated.)

You could have something as simple as a fetchmail/procmail setup that stores all the mail traffic that maintains a rolling archive to your retention guideline. Or you could have a little more advanced setup using opensource stuff like MailArchiva or Enkive. Or, you implement a full commercial solution that is built to handle the tougher requirements (handling indexing/taping/database stuff, rules etc) and also usually has much nicer tech to handle volume using dedupe but also having more robust archive retrieval/reporting. If the org / company often needed to utilize their archives regularly over the course of business (eg, medical, legal, etc) then the extra cost is usually worth it.
 
Also, forgot to mention, another big one used these days is Postini. Cloud retention.
 
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