Add old vault store to EV

[fizzle_nyc]

I recently took over responsibility of EV 7.5. Unfortunately, emails in the vault are incomplete. After searching through tapes for days, I restored a 176 GB DATA folder from a tape, which contains over 1 million items.

My question is, how can I add this folder into EV 7.5, and export whatever old emails to various PST files?

Thank you so much for your help.

[JesusWept3]

really what you need to do is contact support and get a hold of a utility called DVSChecker, this will put back the DVS files back in to their respective mailboxes, also you may want to get another tool first called VSVerify

The two utilities do two very specific things

1. VSVerify
VSVerify first scans the Database to look for each piece of archived email and make sure that it exists on disk, if there are missing files from your disk, you have the ability to either try and find the item from backup and put it back or remove the item from the database

Use Case:
Say you have a catastrophic failure on your disk and you can only recover 3/4 of your email from backup and have resigned to the fact that you can't get that email back, vsverify can either report on genuinely how much data you are missing, or to remove the items from the database and the indexes so its a clean deletion (i.e it will stop people from seeing items in their index when it doesn't exist on the database, and saves you a call when the user says that they can't retrieve that email)


2. DVSChecker
DVSChecker will scan the Vault stores and go through each DVS File (which is an archived piece of email) and will check whether the entries exist in the database. You then have the chance to put the items back in to the database.

Use Case:
Say you have a catastrophic failure on your SQL Database and the last good back up was from2  days ago, well you now have 2 days worth of archived email that can't be accessed by the users because the pointers in SQL Do not exist, you would run DVSChecker to scan each piece of email and then repair the database.

DVSChecker has some limitations though, if you use collections, you would have to uncollect the CAB files and put the DVS files back in their original location and then run the utility again

Also you may have a situation where an archive was created AFTER the last good SQL Backup, and so the DVS files that belong to that user cannot be put back

For instance if you enable someone on 01/18/2010 and archive a bunch of emails, and then the database goes down, last database restore was from 01/16/2010, that user no longer exists in the database, so you would have to re-enable him....however for the archived email, because certain ID's and such won't match between the DVS and the archive, the items can't be placed back in the database


So the question is for you, why are these items missing?
Were the genuinely deleted by deleting archives, running storage expiry, allowing users to delete? If so you could be re-introducing items that were genuinely meant to be deleted

If however its due to a storage crash, then the entries should still exist in the database and simply putting the items back in to their original location, should make them accessible, however if they were genuinely deleted and you want to re-introduce them back in to the environment then you would have to use DVSChecker

So just be sure you're not opening yourself up to more issues with users that are now seeing items they thought they had deleted, or from legal if they had forced specific items to be deleted out of the environment.

In Enterprise Vault 8, both utilities VSVerify and DVSChecker are combined in to a single storage utility named EVSVR

[fizzle_nyc]

JesusWept2,

Thank you for your reply.

I didn't state my situiation clearly last time. Right now, we are not using EV, and is using Excahnge 2010 SP1 Archive option. But we want to export all the old emails out of EV into various PSTs, and import them into Exchange.

I found out last week that previous IT manager didn't keep all old emails in the EV. After searching through tapes, I found a backup tape with EV DATA folder on it from previous, previous IT manager (yeah, I know.) This folder contain about 1.5 million items (or DVS files.)

What I want to do is to ignore all current setup (EV Store, Store patition, SQL database, etc.,) and focus on this restored folder. I am wondering where should I get started to import the DATA folder into EV, and export whatever in this folder to PST files?

Thank you for your help.

[JesusWept3]

its just not going to happen, you will need a full infrastructure to import the items in to.
Honestly you will most likely have to pay a lot of money either by getting symantec consultancy reinstute the data somewhere and pushing it back in to its correct place or paying a lot of money to someone like globanet to develop an application that can take the DVS files and sort them in to the PST files

The real problem is, you don't actually have indicators as to who archived the item

So for instance lets say you have an item and its archive ID is abcd1234yoursite

You know its sent from User A to User B
Does that mean the email belongs to user A? or user B? what folder was it in?

What EV does is it records all of that type of information in the database
so it can lookup that archiveID = User A, and it can look up the Folder ID and see it was in \Sent Items

But without that information its just a guess, it could be owned by User B and in their \Inbox folder etc

Honestly i think that data is pretty much lost