Selection_006PSTs are a major problem for organizations.  They contain business-critical information yet they are typically stored locally on  users desktop or laptop computers. Inconsistent and decentralized data makes e-discovery a major obstacle for legal teams.

I recently completed a PST migration where we moved 30 terabytes of PST data (15,000+ PSTs) into an Enterprise Vault data archiving system. We selected TransVault Insight as our PST discovery tool for this project.

PSTs are also prone to corruption and data loss. Many organizations are opting to migrate their PST data into archiving systems such as Symantec Enterprise Vault as a solution to this problem.

For this project we selected TransVault Insight which allowed us to copy all users PST’s directly from their computers (3,300+) to a central repository. It does this with the use of a lightweight agent that is installed on each user’s computer.

Deployment was simple

  • Installed the agents through a Active Directory GPO.
  • Setup 1 TransVault Master server (VM) to control tasks. This system generated useful reports for management.
  • Setup 1 TransVault Controller server (VM) at each site. This server took the commands sent by the master server and performed work such as copying the PST data to the central repository.
  • Deployed 1 Microsoft SQL server to store the configuration information for the migration environment. The database also stored the metadata for the PSTs found.

Once we had the PST data we then used the native importer built into Symantec Enterprise Vault to import the files. We could have also used TransVault Migrator to perform this task which would have been much easier. I am looking forward to combining both Insight and Migrator in future migrations.