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How are PST files used in your environment?

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Permalink Reply by Raj Patel on February 17, 2009 at 5:42pm

We've set group policy to prevent PST creation.

Previously we went through a process (before I started though) of importing PST's into our mail archive system.

Now we're trying to get our quotas enforced to reduce our storage needs and promote our mail archive system so people don't horde mail.

Cheers,
Raj.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on February 18, 2009 at 11:15pm

Raj,

I'm curious, are there settings that prevent it? What did you do to actually create that policy? We're just now switching to an exchange infrastructure (outsourced to Apptix), and I'd love to prevent my users from using their machines from storing...well..anything.

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Permalink Reply by John McGrath on February 19, 2009 at 1:56pm

We use PST's for most of our customers, but are moving to Enterprise Vault for our 200+ mb or customers that require long term mail storage.

PST's are truely the bane of mail archiving. If they don't get corrupted, when they get over 100mb, they become an indexing nightmare in Outlook.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on February 19, 2009 at 4:21pm

@Will

Nice, great links, thanks!

I'm new to this whole windows-admin thing :-) It's a bit different than the 10+ years of Linux admin experience I've accumulated, and I'm having to wrap my brain around the differences.

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Permalink Reply by Tim Seymour on February 19, 2009 at 4:16pm

We use roaming profiles in an Active Directory managed domain. Thus all PST files are saved to the user's profile on our file server. The file server is then backed up nightly, weekly, and then monthly. That really minimizes any work we do with PST files. Also, the majority of our users have Exchange email, so if a PST file is corrupted we simply remove it, recreate the local preferences, and Exchange does the rest of the work.

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Permalink Reply by Raj Patel on February 21, 2009 at 1:27am

Isn't the catch that if people leave their computer locked with Outlook running then the PST is also 'live' ? If you back it up you'll get a crash consistant backup but not much else (or the agent will just fail to backup a locked PST file).

Some mail archive products provide import tools for PST's too - so you can just pull them in and delete them.

Our big problem is convincing the business to bring in quotas (after all 'disk is cheap!'). We've got people with 7-8Gb mailboxes which cause us no end of grief.

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Permalink Reply by John McGrath on February 19, 2009 at 8:48pm

Thanks for the post, Will.

This might be the resolution for us too.

John

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Hengesbach on February 19, 2009 at 9:12pm

John M - I think you've hit the nail on the head. PST files are more or less evil and will cause much suffering at some point.

Tim Seymour - What happens when an archive pst is corrupted? At this point messages have been removed from Exchange. If you have a back-end archiving system you'd be covered. OST's are pretty good for users often disconnected but when they get 'big' Outlook performance begins to suffer.

I've got PST's in my environment largely to keep Gigs of ancient mail from consuming too much space on exchange. My local users keep them on the network(technically a no-no according to MS) but mobile users have to keep theirs local. The glory of that situation is that Microsoft's folder sync does not support pst files - requiring a more manual solution...

I'd love to move to some integrated/seemless vaulting solution - but cost always seems be an issue.

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Permalink Reply by Matt Simmons on February 19, 2009 at 9:57pm

Jeff, have you looked at the prices that Global Relay charges? I've been really impressed by what they've quoted us.

We're using them as our archival solution, and they'll even import our legacy emails, in addition to archiving the mail going forward. They also do XMPP archiving as well. I've been really impressed.

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Permalink Reply by Charlie Rudinger on December 2, 2009 at 6:05pm

We use pst's religiously here... Though I'm not really not wanting to drink the kool-aide. We have users that I've found to have 8 gig pst's that haven't blown up. I wish we could do like Raj and restrict them but our business we have to keep documents up to 7 years some times and our users have a hard time understanding that you can save and back up elsewhere. My associate SysAdmin have looked into a few solutions but everyone of them is above 10k.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley "Nonapeptide" on December 2, 2009 at 7:24pm

PSTs greater than 2GBs should be fine as long as they're unicode. I hope those PSTs are included in one of your backup paths, especially if their users are on laptops. I'll not soon forget seeing a badly abused laptop returned to the helpdesk with the explanation that the user accidentally ran it over with their car. "Accidentally." As if. =)

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Permalink Reply by Charlie Rudinger on December 2, 2009 at 7:40pm

the car thing has happened here too and at my old job in Detroit, the one in detroit was a toughbook though...