How do I backup a large number of large PSTs?

In the ideal world, we’d change user behavior to clean up their PSTs to make
them more manageable, and we’d implement one or more of the backup
alternatives you mentioned.

However we’re dealing with the real world here, and need a real world
solution.

One thing that concerns me is that there’s typically a lot more to life than
a PST. How are you backing up everything else?

To just answer the specific question you’ve asked, here’s the ‘real world’
path I’d head down:

• Copy the PSTs from their local machines to a network backup
  server nightly. Weekly is not often enough, in my opinion. If these
  folks use email to any serious degree losing a weeks worth of email on restore
  from backup is too high a cost.

• Backup that file server nightly, probably to tape. If all
  the user files are placed on the server overnight and the server is used for
  nothing else, then the tape backup could actually run during the day.

Like I said, I think nightly backups are important, and I think preserving
those backups to tape is also important. Once on tape you can decide how long
you want to keep your backups: a week, a month, a year, or longer. That becomes
a policy decision, not a technical one.

•

With that out of the way, I want to address what I fear is a bigger issue.
Great, you’ve backed up their PSTs. What about everything else on their
machines? Perhaps they have work documents that aren’t part of email that would
represent a catastrophic loss if a hard disk crashed.

In other words, backing up email is not enough.

I believe you need to look at the much bigger picture of how data of all
sorts is managed in your environment and how it’s being backed up. Or not.
Pick a random user’s machine and ask: if this machine and all the data on it
disappeared, how much of a problem would that be? I’m guessing there’s more
than email that your users would care about.

The problem here is that there’s no single magic answer in an environment
such as you describe. For the single machine home user an external hard drive
and a good backup program are enough. For your situation you probably want
something more comprehensive for your 200+ users.

One thing you can count on, though: even with the best of intentions you
cannot rely on all 200 of those users to backup themselves. In an
ideal world, maybe, but here in the real world? It’s just not gonna happen.

Ideas:

• Run a backup program on every user’s machine, and send their backups nightly
  to a backup server, then back that up to tape periodically. This is pretty much
  like the PST-only solution above except it handles all data, not just the
  PST.

• Rather than running the backup program on every machine, use some form of
  administrative network access to run a backup program on the backup server that
  fetches the data from the 200 machines over your network. Then backup to
  tape.

• Have a nightly process on each user’s machine that simply copies their data
  to a central server. This could be as simple as copying the “My Documents”
  folder tree, but you must be careful and double check before making
  that assumption. This also assumes that the “system” portion of each machine
  has no data worth preserving and that systems are easily reinstalled/rebuilt
  except for user data.

Of course you could give everyone an external hard drive and a backup
program and set them up to backup each machine individually. For a set of
machines that large and with that many users, the issue here is that there’s
no auditability, and each user needs to at least be able to notice if the
backup’s not working.

•

I can’t resist talking just a little about the ideal world as well. Perhaps
some of it’ll rub off and generate some ideas that might make sense in your
situation.

Ideally we’d educate all users in the importance of keeping their PST’s lean
and mean. Perhaps we’d have them create “archive” PSTs which could be kept out
on your network somewhere while keeping their active PSTs small, fast, and more
importantly easier to back up.

You might mention potential data loss to your users since older versions of
Outlook’s file format break when the file exceeds 2 gigabytes in size. It’s
also not enough to be running a newer version of Outlook; it’s the file format
in use that matters and Outlook does not automatically upgrade the
file format.

And no amount of backing up – by your users or by you – will recover the
data lost due to exceeding that file size.