Import orphan PST into vault

[giuliod]

Hi

I have a multiple PSTs whose mailbox/users have been already deleted from Exch/AD. What do you think is the best approach to migrate them into vault? I was thinking to create and provision a user and import them all there. Do you have any other ideas?

Thanks for your thoughts.

[JesusWept3]

I think thats the only way you can do it.
Im still shocked that you can't import a PST in to an archive without it having a user, in my opinion that should be bugged with a case opened with symc, but none the less, your proposed solution is the only viable one that others have had to resort to in the past on this forum

[giuliod]

Thanks Jesus. Actually the users were never enabled in EV, so there are no Archives for them.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

In which case then yes, to create a user archive, you have to enable an actual user that exists in AD and Exchange and is provisioned.
The only other way would be to manually create a Shared Archive in the Vault Admin Console and then import to the shared archive.

The downside of a shared archive is that it is not "Structured", meaning that when you import the PST file, it will not keep the folder structure

So like \Inbox, \Deleted Items, \Sent Items, \My Folder etc all those items will be lumped in to one single folder, which means it can be difficult to determine what was sent by the user, what was deleted by the user.

Now having said that, if the reason you're importing them is because of Legal reasons and you want to run Searches against them, Discovery Accelerator doesn't care about folder structures anyway, so a shared archive would be just fine, however if you want someone to review it and go through archive explorer and see the exact same layout as the PST? then you need a user archive and not a shared archive.

Oh and one other thing, i would suggest making backups of the PSTs before you import them, as when each item is imported, it will get deleted from the PST, if for whatever reason something goes wrong and you want to start from scratch, you will need the original PSTs, otherwise the ones you are left with are oing to be missing the items that did import succesfully