PST File Hell Make Missing email a thing of the past…
The problems with holding on to the old instead of going through the learning curve are many. The most frustrating is that we tend to get caught repeating the problems of yesterday. Missing emails shouldn’t happen. They do and it’s big trouble in our high speed, interconnected modern world. At one time we all participated in PST Hell and searched and looked for missing emails. Tekmar Solutions, Inc. and our customers and many of our partners and clients overcame the hell of having different storage files, PSTs for emails on different devices by moving to more unified message at the turn of the millennium almost 15 years ago.
Surprisingly many people are still suffering PST Hell. They include Google Apps user, independent companies using a variety of similar web mail systems, many Exchange users and even our Federal government. Below are tickler bullet points from a ZD-Net Government article by David Gewirtz.
- Opposition-controlled Congress demands administration emails as part of an investigation? Check.
- Administration claims Congress is conducting a witch hunt? Check.
- There are real questions about the administration’s behavior in a potential scandal? Check.
- Somehow all the relevant email messages go suddenly missing? Check.
- Claims for what went wrong with email management seem ludicrous to IT professionals? Check.
- Administration claims about the cost of recovering the lost email messages seem impossibly inflated? Check.
- It’s almost impossible to tell whether administration IT management is as incomprehensibly unprofessional as it seems — or if a pretense of cluelessness being used to divert questions of disclosure? Check.
Sound familiar?
Which administration am I talking about? Is it the Obama administration, where an IRS director claims to have lost potentially incriminating email messages? Or was it the Bush administration, where email messages about the firing of eight U.S. attorneys somehow went missing?
Hah! Trick question! The correct answer is: both…
In both the Bush-fired attorneys and the Obama IRS nonprofit cases, Outlook was used as an email client and email messages were stored in PST files. As we all know, PST files are not exactly the most robust of file formats and they tend to corruption. Clearly, storing email just in PST files is not an archiving best practice.
Further, for reasons that have always been inexplicable to me, Microsoft didn’t locate their PST files in the My Documents or Documents folder, so users who knew to back-up My Documents would backup their PST files. As a result, users who switched computers often found that they lost their email archives, even when using Outlook’s own “Do you want to archive now?” built in resource.
–By David Gewirtz for ZDNet Government | June 24, 2014 — 12:00 GMT (05:00 PDT)
Actually in the modern versions of office the Outlook Files folder within the My Documents folder. But David’s points are valid. Do you know where your emails are located when stored? If you are using a PST file you are potentially in jeopardy of missing emails. Are you not sure? Tekmar can help.
Here are five quick, quite steps to fixing the problem.
- Make a plan
- Get some help to do the discovery
- Learn some new skills
- Upgrade to the latest application software
- Store data in the clouds