Managing Outlook archives (PSts)?

[Jack Black]

How are you guys managing your large Outlook (2k3, 2k7) email archives?
We've had an Exchange back end for about five years now, and many of our
users archive PSTs are in excess of 6 Gig in size. MS says max should be 2
Gig, and none of the tools I've seen can do anything with the larger PSTs.
How do you guys manage your huge archives? Saying "better management" isn't
a solution, because as attorneys they are required by law to keep seven
years of client communications, and don't have the time or inclination to
micro-manage all of their emails into dozens of external PSTs versus a
single archive PST.

Are there any low-end and high-end solutions? Open source solutions? What
do you guys do?

Thanks for any input!
Jack

 

[Roady [MVP]]

Unicode formatted pst-files from Outlook 2003 or later can grow beyond 20GB
and most recovery tools can manage those sizes as well. Whether or not that
is practical is a different question ;-)

If you are using Exchange, you should not want to enable clients to use
local pst-files unless you are a very small business and the users know how
to deal with pst-files themselves. An alternative would be to assign them a
separate archiving mailbox or Public Folder to store the data in. A Public
Folder has the benefit of being able to restrict the users from deleting
items from it.

Larger companies should look into server-side Exchange archiving so they can
release the archiving burden from their users and manage the archiving
centrally according to the corporate policies and prevent end user
"mistakes" which results in a los of certain messages. Exchange 2010 has
built-in support for archiving.