Import historical data for legal discovery

[Carmila_Fresco]

I need to import data into the vault from old backup tapes for a legal discovery. What's the recommended way of doing this so that I would not get duplicates when I run a search in DA? Running a search in EV does not give me duplicates however, running a search in DA comes up with a lot of duplicate messages.

Thanks,
Carmila

[TonySterling]

As you are doing your backups and archiving them it might be useful to use the
FwdDateEligibility and FwdDateEligibilityEnd registry keys.

In the Documentation folder for the install the Registy values.chm will explain them and show where they go. They should keep you from archiving data that is contained on two backup tapes.

Set FwdDateEligibility to control the earliest date of items that all Archiving Services will archive. This is useful if you want to restore multiple Exchange Server backups in sequence, archiving each one and then restoring the next.

By setting FwdDateEligibility to be the date of the previous backup you can archive just items that are newer than that date.

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi,

I believe that in V6 these are no longer registry keys but policy settings.

[Carmila_Fresco]

Can you please elaborate the process for v6?

We're on EV 6sp1.

Thanks,
Carmila

[Jason_Szeto]

How are you recovering the data from tape? Are you recovering data for the whole company or just a few individuals?

Here's what I did for one customer. They had to recover about 3 years worth of email for about 12 individuals, they did not do brick level backups so they had to restore the entire Exchange information store and export their mailboxes to PSTs. We had hundreds of PSTs, so what I did was use Exmerge to exmerge the PSTs into a mailbox, I used 12 mailboxes one for each individual and created a separate Journal vault and service.

Exmerge for the most part got rid of my duplicates because it will ignore duplicates and journaling will be the fastest way to get the items into the vault.

[Carmila_Fresco]

Jason,

We just need to restore mailboxes for about 12 individuals. We didn't use brick level backups to back up the data. We're using Ontrack Power Controls to extract the data from the backups. Data can either be exported into a mailbox in exchange or to a PST file.

If an email message has been archived and all is left in the mailbox is the shortcut, does exmerge treat the shortcut as a duplicate message?

Thanks,
Carmila

[Jason_Szeto]

I'm not sure how Exmerge will react when the duplicate message is a shortcut. That's something you'll have to try out on your own.

Although what I might suggest is, instead of restoring everything into the original mailboxes. Why don't you create one historical journal mailbox, finish all your restores then create a journal task and journal all that data into EV.

[Carmila_Fresco]

Unfortunately it doesn't treat the shortcut as a duplicate. I guess we'll just have to finish the restores before archiving them into the vault unless there's some other way to do this.

Thanks,
Carmila

[Michael_Feldman]

Camila, we are currently doing exactly the same thing as you are, the only difference is we are migrating all the Historical data into a separate Vault/Parition to avoid the chance of duplication. We are also running Ontrack Power controls to extract the data from the backup tapes. Then using EVPM script to migrate all the pst's into EV..

[Carmila_Fresco]

Michael,

I'm also migrating the historical data into a separate vault.

Would you be kind enough to share the evpm script that you are using to do the import?

Thanks,
Carmila

[Michael_Feldman · Accepted solution]

Camila, hope this is usefull...

"D:\apps\Enterprise Vault\evpm.exe" -e exchgsrvr -m -f
%1:\work\pstlist_1.ini > %1:\work\result2.log


this should do the trick...make sure the initialization file (ini) has the defaults u want setup there...

(like so)

DirectoryComputerName =
SiteName =


MigrationMode = Process
; change to Process when checked out ok
PSTLanguage = Western European
ConcurrentMigrations = 3 (depending on amount of processors)
IncludeDeletedItems = True (if need be)


PSTLanguage = Western European
FileName = d:\example\Example.pst
RetentionCategory = Business
ArchiveName =

(if you have 12 pst's you should have 12 of the entries...with filename=nameof.pst)

[Carmila_Fresco]

Thank you!

I will give this a shot.

[Jason_Szeto]

One thing I want to point out though and someone correct me if I'm wrong. When you use the PST migrator it will make duplicate index records for duplicate items. So if you have the exact same message in 12 different PSTs, when you run a search you'll get 12 hits.