When Exchange 2010 SP1 came out, the Email Team decided the secondary mailbox, or Archive mailbox, was not really archiving, but it was something we could use.
The Problems:
Our server farm housing our Home Shares were always full and the Server Team were constantly struggling to get 1G back here and 1G back there. Then after all their hard work, before you knew it, the file servers were full again.
The Server Team added 6T of space in the last 2 years. It was beginning to look like they could never keep pace. And, of course, we were reminded over and over that Microsoft does not support PST files on a share in this way.
During that same time, we were testing a product that could do PST file ingestion, but it required something to be installed on the users PC and our delivery system was not working so well. (Let's not even start talking about the red tape!) So for about a year we stayed stuck in this quagmire.
At one point, The Powers That Be came to the Email Team and wanted us "To import these PST files into our archiving software 'right away' and how long would it take to complete?"
If we were going to decide how long it would take to ingest all PST files, we'd be needing some information to go on. I wrote a quick report in Powershell taking all the people in AD with mailboxes (enabled and disabled) then scanned their home directory for PST files.
To our surprise there was 12T used by PST's. Over 21,000 created by just a little over 3000 people. There was one person that had over 500 PST's. Wow! How could one person have that much time to create that many?
We scratched our heads on how to get these imported with the software we already paid for which doesn't work so good. And also this software that didn't work so good depended on an EXE being delivered to the PC and that process didn't work so good either. So I told The Powers That Be ingesting all PST files will take 2 years. I guessed.
Along comes 2010 SP1 and Archive Mailbox
Since we had been fighting the evil demon of PST files for about a year, without anyone really doing anything or getting anywhere, The Email Team started making plans to import all these PST files into Archive mailboxes and bypass our Archiving Software completely. We were thinking it was time for new Archiving Software and no sense spending time on software we would not be using. So using the Archiving Software for PST ingestion went out the window.
We could use PowerShell to import directly into our Archive Mailbox without touching the PC at all.
We did not want the current mailbox databases to get bloated with new data, so we decided to create new mailbox databases and excluded them from automatic mailbox creation. We added 500G drives to each of our 8 DAG member server and set up mailbox databases. We ended up with 32 drives, equaling 16T. We also wanted a fail over copy of each database so we really only had 8T. We hoped with de-duplication and a lot of PST files being "backup of backups" we could fit the 12T into the 8T. We found a pilot group and started Importing PST files. We had about 45 users imported when ...
Disaster Happens
Luckily, is wasn't anything to do with Exchange. It was the Home Shares. Turned out the push of Office 2010, many open PST files, and probably no telling what else, used up all the resources on the server farm housing the Home Shares and it went down. There were terrified people running up and down the halls but mainly everyone wanted to know how to get to their PST files! "You have to fix this and NOW!"
You think I'm joking. We had to say we are not on the Server Team, and we just have to wait. More than likely nothing will be damaged and you'll be just fine.
Those 40 people we had already migrated, were very happy their PST (now folders in the Archive Mailbox) were safe and sound.
So how do we convince all the other Users to switch over to Archive Mailbox?
We use the Home Share Disaster to scare the hell out of them!
I started working on the scripts, we were doing our pilot group one by one manually using a snippet here and there. But now we're talking about potentially 100 users at a time. We had to come up with a better script.
This is the intoduction to a series of posts I've made about my experiences using Powershell to import PST files.
Part 1: Script Requirements
Part 2: Add-PSTImportQueue
Part 3: Process-PSTImportQueue
Part 4: Some Tools we added
Part 5: Set-PSTImportQueue
Part 6: About PST Capture
Part 7: More PST Import Tools
Part 8: Using RoboCopy
Part 9: Morning Status Report
Part 10: Using BITS Transfer
Part 11: Get the script / Set up
Part 12: The Functions
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