Efficient e-mail archiving: dealing with backups and legacy mail.

E-mail has become the lifeblood of business. More than any other means of communication or business tool, companies rely on electronic messages (often stored on the Microsoft Exchange Server) for running virtually every aspect of their enterprises including simple internal communications, vital sales calls to customers, invoicing, and high-level decision-making. A company could not survive without e-mail, just as it could not survive without telephones or electricity. Not only does it increase employee and business efficiency, but it is also the most cost-effective means of communication. In today's business environment, e-mail recovery has risen to a new level of significance crucial to a company's existence.

In addition to the monetary value of e-mail, there are a variety of regulatory demands for recovering e-mails that dictate more robust storage practices. Several state and federal regulations require that e-mail be kept as a normal part of doing business. The Food and Drug Administration and the Security and Exchange Commission have rules for what information must be stored and made accessible. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) has imposed a variety of regulations on how health-related information must be stored. Most recently, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2004 requires companies to certify that they have internal controls in place ensuring the accuracy and veracity of financial reporting. Included in this reporting requirement are internal controls related to records management and storage.

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Since e-mail dominates today's business environment (often containing vital pieces of information that may assist a company in tracking key events, employee behavior and information exchanges), e-mails can also be valid legal documents. As such, they require secure storage, restoration and production in the event of an investigation or lawsuit. It is imperative that IT staff understand and comply with the regulations for producing e-mails as formal records versus simply restoring e-mails for internal business purposes.

These examples demonstrate that all of this "old e-mail" can no longer be simply deleted and forgotten. Old messages are becoming increasingly important for corporations, as many companies have faced requirements during the past few years to search through backup tapes to recover old e-mails in response to a request from the legal department, human resources department or another division within the enterprise. These companies are left with the option of recovering e-mail from backup tapes which is possible in many cases, but extremely difficult for a number of reasons including disruption to normal IT procedures, the need to create recovery server for restorations, time spent searching for needed content, and time required of IT personnel for the task.

All of these factors have resulted in e-mail management taking on increased importance in the corporate environment. Companies are quickly realizing the value of incorporating more sophisticated e-mail archiving systems that can make storage simpler through automatic indexing, storage and purging of records according to corporate policies, especially in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare or financial services. Utilizing new message archiving systems can also provide additional benefits, including the ability to automatically migrate messaging system content to other storage media.

Without simplified archiving systems, restorations with e-mail using Microsoft Exchange can be extremely difficult and resource-draining procedures. This is chiefly due to the need to create or maintain an Exchange Recovery Server to restore the data. In many recovery situations, the mailbox administrator must engage in the time-consuming, complicated and costly building of a Recovery Server--a task requiring mail to be separately imported back into Exchange or Outlook. This is even more difficult when multiple backup sets are involved, because every backup has to be restored to a server that matches the exact settings with which it was created. However, there is an uncomplicated way to achieve restoration of e-mail on backups that can work immediately with the most popular backup architectures.

Ontrack PowerControls, mailbox recovery software, helps solve many of the difficulties involved with restoring and searching e-mail archives using Exchange as addressed above. PowerControls does not require any changes to the normal backup process, working in concert with the current backup procedures. If those backups are changed, it will work with them as well. The software can directly read EDB files, so there is no need to do brick-level backups to restore individual messages and mailboxes. This makes e-mail restoration much more convenient because it can be handled from an entire database level down to the individual message level. PowerControls can also directly read backup tapes, regardless of the settings used to create them. This means there is no need to create even one Recovery Server, let alone several for multiple backups.

PowerControls has complete searching capability that Exchange Server does not employ. It lets you search across all mailboxes in an archive EDB file, rather than searching one mailbox at a time or bringing an old backup online for analysis. The EDB file can be searched by a variety of criteria, including keywords, subject, date and specific users. Individual mailboxes need not be backed up because they can be restored directly from an EDB file. PowerControls is simple to install and deploy because it is designed to run from a Windows workstation and uses native Microsoft Messaging APIs (MAPI) to communicate to the Exchange Server, ensuring reliable and consistent operation of the server.

One problem remains, however, posing a significant challenge to companies integrating new archiving systems--converting their legacy mail into the new system. A significant drawback with new archiving systems is their inability to automatically make old mail part of the new system. New archiving systems are great for any mail created after they are installed, but old mail remains a challenge. As described above, access to legacy mail is extremely important as restore requests due to regulatory or legal requirements could apply to mail that is several years old. If restorations are done with old backup tapes, the process can take a significant amount of time and use valuable IT resources. As painful as the process may be, old messages will often have to be recovered. For those not able to produce old e-mails, the consequences have been severe, including massive fines costing millions of dollars.

PowerControls will work with backups that have already been performed, so data can be restored from any backups that exist prior to installing PowerControls. For legacy mail, this can be useful in two different ways: a company could simply leave their legacy mail on tapes created with their old archiving system and use PowerControls to read the tapes, or they could use PowerControls to extract that data into the new system using a transfer agent. PowerControl's command line feature helps make the conversion of legacy mail into a completely automated process. It allows you to easily batch repetitive processes such as multiple copy and export tasks without initiating the PowerControls user interface.

Another feature that can help with the process of converting legacy mail is the PowerControls export feature. The export feature allows you to export mail from an EDB or PST source file to a local or network drive destination. You can save exported messages as Microsoft Outlook files (.msg) or plain text files (.txt). This feature can assist customers who want to copy old e-mail backups into an alternate or non-e-mail system. You can export at all levels: an EDB file, a PST file, a mailbox, a folder, and individual messages.

All of these features help with e-mail archiving issues by making PowerControls the equivalent of a data processing engine. It's necessary to analyze PowerControls' architecture. (Fig. 1)

Step 1: As normal, backup software backs up an Exchange database and creates Exchange backup sets.

Step 2: The PowerControls ExtractWizard restores the database to an alternate location that is not an Exchange server, as shown in Step 2.

Step 3: PowerControls can now be used to view and search through individual mailboxes, messages and attachments, as shown in Step 3.

Step 4: PowerControls can restore a single mailbox, messages or attachments back to the production Exchange server, or to a new or existing PST file at another location.

As you can see from the diagram, one of PowerControls' most powerful and useful feature is its ExtractWizard. Most backup programs only let you restore Exchange data to the same or a duplicate server from which it was backed up. ExtractWizard will restore Exchange data to any machine, volume or folder that you want.

When the user runs the ExtractWizard, they first indicate where the data is currently located. PowerControls searches the location for data files, and shows all that it finds. The user chooses the files they want to restore, and then tell the wizard where they want the data restored. The wizard then goes to work restoring the data to the location they defined.

Although a powerful piece of software, PowerControls is simple to use. It walks the user through the process of selecting an Exchange database to restore, whether to restore to an Exchange server or PST file, and the location of that server or file. If the user needs to restore individual mailboxes or messages, they can instead first directly open the EDB file, and then open the PST file or Exchange server to which you'll be restoring mailboxes or messages.

With e-mail restore requests becoming a more normal part of doing business, it is crucial that companies have the means to make archived messages available in the shortest amount of time. Timesaving processes can help any company become more compliant and improve service for internal customers.

Jim Reinert serves as senior director of Software and Services for Ontrack Data Recovery (Eden Prairie, MN)

www.ontrack.com