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PST Files and more PST Files. Is the horse beaten to death yet?

Last of the PST Files… Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies Honestly, having been in the email archiving business for almost 10 years,

Last of the PST Files…

Jeff Laubhan – Waterford Technologies

Honestly, having been in the email archiving business for almost 10 years, I am surprised that we are still talking about this subject, but it came up last week in conversation with a friend.

She works for a large healthcare provider in Northern California and was ranting at me as to why I haven’t sold my technology to her company. I said well, sure, I have tried but I’m not sure if they care to be honest. I asked “what’s up?” She just lost her last PST file (over 6 GB) and the IT group hadn’t backed it up on the network for 3 months. Yea, that’s not good. She was livid. I asked if she asked the helpdesk team about recovery and their answer was “yea, no”. She talked to the manager of IT and he said “well, we don’t officially support PSTs on the network.” She said, “Well, you guys beat me up with a small quota and I have huge files that I email, what am I supposed to do?” He said, “You can always keep PST files locally”. She asked if they would back it up to be safe and they said “No, we actually don’t support PST files locally either”.  She asked what he would recommend and he said you have a few options:

  • To save off the emails and attachments you need
  • Send a copy back to yourself

And she asked about an email archiving system. The IT manager said no, legal/compliance wouldn’t allow archiving. That’s interesting, a whole other conversation. I wonder what they are hiding.  But what about just to consolidate and eliminate PST files? The IT manager said they don’t have time, servers, resources, etc. to manage that.

So, she began asking people to send emails back to her that she knew were in there. The scary part was that she doesn’t know what she lost.

Yes, options can be archiving just to eliminate PST files and ensure proper data is captured. By the nature of PST files they are islands and typically hold duplicates of the same email and attachment. If you import 100 PSTs the likelihood is that 50% if not of the emails and file are the same copy. How much can you save? It all depends on your duplicates, but imagine not having the frustration that end users have?

To learn more you might review our section on Individual Search and retrieval from the archive (ISR)