Have you ever tried to repair PST files or execute a PST backup? Corrupt PST files can be the bane of existence for many sys admins, contributing to much of the premature baldness and alcoholism present in today’s IT world. The chief provocateur of this rampant PST debauchery is a little something called the export-mailbox cmdlet which allows the user to archive Exchange 2007 mailboxes to another mailbox in the same forest, or into a pesky PST file. This is a terrible idea, for not only does one risk losing their entire archive in a blaze of PST-corrupted glory, but navigation and storage of these files is unnecessarily complicated as well.
The following script allows for some variations, but simply put, it isolates emails from before February 22nd, 2011 with “Payroll’ in the subject heading, and places them into a folder called PSTStorage:
Get-Mailbox –OrganizationalUnit -EndDate “02/22/2011” “ou=Accounting,ou=Structure,dc=mydomain,dc=local” export-mailbox –SubjectKeywords “Payroll” –PstFolderPath c:\PSTStorage –DeleteContent –confirm:$false
As you can see, not only is the scripting tricky, requiring a nominal amount of programming knowledge, but it is important to note that network stored PST files have been unsupported since the days of Exchange 4.0. The Windows Server Performance Team has a post from 2007 outlining the deficiencies of the PST format and yet to this day there are system admins battling against a torrent of users begging for PST support. I say enough is enough! There is a bevy of third party Exchange archiving and Active Directory tools available on the market, MADSolutions Email Management Server not being the least of these, that can make sure that PST’s don’t hurt anybody ever again.
But are there any problems with PST files aside from their frequent rate of corruption and tendency to be misplaced? You bet there are – Microsoft KB Article #297019 details that “Microsoft Outlook tries to use the file commands to read from the file or write to the file, but the operating system then has to send those commands over the network because the file is not on the local computer. This creates a great deal of overhead and increases the time it takes to read and write to the file.” The stress placed upon network resources confirms that PST files should have been banished long ago, and luckily there is a email management solution.