If you have a large volume of data to migrate, it is recommended that you contract a migration specialist to assist you.

But here are some steps to consider:

Stage 1: Assess

In this stage you will need to determine the state of your Enterprise Vault environment.  Some questions to ask so that you have the necessary information to plan an effective migration are:

• How many archive vault stores do I have?
• Does my vault consist of mailbox archives, journal archives, or both?
• Are there multiple retention policies and/or tags that are currently applied to my archived messages?
• Do I have Discovery Accelerator and/or Compliance Accelerator?
• Do I have messages on legal hold?
• Do I have any active cases in Discovery Accelerator?

Stage 2: Plan

In this stage you will utilize the information collected from your assessment of your Enterprise Vault environment and begin planning a course of action for your migration.

During the Enterprise Vault to Enterprise Vault.cloud migration it is a best practice to stop archiving messages into the Enterprise Vault environment and simultaneously begin journaling messages into Enterprise Vault.cloud.  Allow current users to continue to access their Enterprise Vault environment until the migration of Enterprise Vault archive messages into Enterprise Vault.cloud has been successfully completed.  If mailbox archiving shortcuts exist, allow them to remain until all archive data has been migrated successfully.  We will discuss removing the shortcuts in stage 3.

If your Enterprise Vault environment has only a single retention policy, no legal holds, and no active cases in Discovery Accelerator, then simply export a copy of your archived messages into PST format and ship them to Enterprise Vault.cloud Data Management for data ingestion.  This is irrespective of whether this is mailbox or journal archive data.

If your Enterprise Vault environment has multiple retention policies, no legal holds, and no active cases in Discovery Accelerator, you will need to stage your exports based on the varying retention policies.  You will need to create retention tags within the Enterprise Vault.cloud administration console to match all the current retention tags that exists in your Enterprise Vault environment.  Next, you should work with your Enterprise Vault.cloud implementation project manager and the Enterprise Vault.cloud data management team to map which PSTs to ingest and the specific Enterprise Vault.cloud retention tags associated with each.

If your Enterprise Vault environment has active case(s) in Discovery Accelerator then you will need to maintain your Enterprise Vault environment irrespective of how many retention tags or legal holds there are.  Best practice would be to discontinue the collection of journal data with Enterprise Vault and start sending messages to Enterprise Vault.cloud for archival.  Export a copy of all Enterprise Vault archived messages to be imported into Enterprise Vault.cloud.  Continue usage of Discovery Accelerator until all cases have been closed.  As cases are closed and legal holds are lifted against Enterprise Vault archived messages you may proceed to perform expiry of those messages in Enterprise Vault.

Stage 3: Deliver

In this last stage you will run your migration plan.  This stage will require that you carefully consider who is best suited to perform the actual migration tasks.

When exporting a copy of your Enterprise Vault archives for ingestion into Enterprise Vault.cloud - it is recommended that you use the Export Archive tool.  Please note that this can only be used with Exchange Server mailbox archiving. If you would like to export items from Domino archives please see the description of Domino Archive Exporter in the Utilities guide.

The Export Archive wizard lets you export archived items to PST files which is the recommended and preferred file format for data ingestion into Enterprise Vault.cloud.

When exporting to PST you can filter the output by date and by retention category. For example, you can export items less than a year old that were archived with a particular retention category.

When you export the wizard lets you control the maximum size of the resulting PST files.  The default maximum of 600 MB is ideal for writing to CD, but Enterprise Vault.cloud can accept PSTs up to 20GB.  If a file reaches the maximum size, the wizard automatically creates additional sequentially numbered files, none of which exceeds the maximum size.

Folders in PST files can contain a maximum of 16,383 items. This is a PST file limitation. If a folder reaches this limit the Export Archive wizard automatically creates a new folder of the same name but with a number suffix. For example, if folder 'Inbox' is full, the Export Archive wizard automatically creates 'Inbox 1' to hold further items.

The wizard creates a configuration file for each PST that you may need if you intend to import the PST file contents back into Enterprise Vault. For example, you can move someone's archived items to another Enterprise Vault site by importing an archive that has been exported in this manner.

You will need to create a CSV map of which PSTs are associated with which user archive account and which Enterprise Vault.cloud retention category.

The Enterprise Vault.cloud Archive Migrator is a software utility that can assist customers migrating less than 2TB of data from Enterprise Vault to Enterprise Vault.cloud.  Archive Migrator supports the migration of Exchange and Domino mailbox and journal archives and matches Enterprise Vault archives to accounts that have been created in Enterprise Vault.cloud using Enterprise Vault.cloud’s CloudLink tool.  It then exports the data located in the Enterprise Vault archive to PST or NSF files depending on the type of archive. The end result is a set of files which can be placed onto removable disks and shipped to the Enterprise Vault.cloud data management team for ingestion into the appropriate Enterprise Vault.cloud archives.

After you have successfully migrated all of your Enterprise Vault archive messages into Enterprise Vault.cloud you will need to remove the Enterprise Vault shortcuts that remain in the end-users’ mailbox and then decommission the Enterprise Vault environment.

By far, the preferred method of shortcut deletion is to use the existing Enterprise Vault administration console.  It’s easy to implement, completely automated and typically reliable.  The mailboxes you want to delete shortcuts from must be active targets in Exchange or Domino and requires a working Enterprise Vault environment.  Simply modify the Mailbox Policy that applies to the relevant mailboxes and configure Shortcut Deletion.

It is best to implement this change well in advance and allow sufficient time for shortcut processing to complete before decommissioning the Enterprise Vault server. You can manually force shortcut processing at any time by performing Run Now on the relevant mailbox archiving task and choosing either “Archiving and Shortcut processing” or “Shortcut processing”.

If you have dynamic shortcuts enabled and the mailbox is still an active target then this option should provide good results. Dynamic shortcuts (the process by which Enterprise Vault moves items within an archive when a user moves the corresponding shortcuts within their mailbox) are only updated during a Shortcut Processing task (part of the Exchange Mailbox Archiving task). This means that recently moved shortcuts won’t be replaced in the users archive if an archive task hasn’t run since the shortcuts were moved.

You want to disable the user for archiving (if you have not done so already) to prevent any additional eligible items from being archived during the next archive run.

The exported data will need to be shipped to Symantec Enterprise Vault.cloud data management team for ingestion into the archive.  For more information, please feel free to reach out to your Symantec sales representative or a Symantec partner.