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Reducing Data Migration Size: Saving Time & Money with The Catalog

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Company X is reducing the amount of data they’re migrating by 80%. How do you do that? How does a company figure out what data needs to be migrated, and what doesn’t? 

It starts with asking the right questions. A customer of ours asked if we could tell them what was in their Journal Archive that wasn’t in their Mailbox Archive. After a little digging, we came to understand what they were really trying to do – figure out what they needed to migrate from Veritas Enterprise Vault to Exchange Online. And we realized the tool that could do this was our very own “Swiss Army Knife” of the Archive Accelerator suite – the Catalog. 

When Migrating (rehydrating) email to Exchange Online from Veritas Enterprise Vault, there are 2 types of archives that might need to be migrated, depending on how Enterprise Vault has been used: 

  1. Mailbox Archives 
  2. Journal Archives 

In this post, I’ll discuss an option to reduce the amount of data migrated in the case that both types of archives need to be moved. 

Think twice 

First, I would just say that if you plan on moving your Journal Archives to Exchange Online, please think twice about this.  We’re seeing more companies come to us that made that move and are now looking to resume using Enterprise Vault Journaling (typically with SMTP archives), because they’ve realized that the Veritas Compliance and e-Discovery options are better.   See https://www.veritas.com/form/webinar/deep-dive-ediscovery-that-goes-beyond-office-365.html to register for an excellent on demand webinar from Veritas that goes over the benefits of eDiscovery with Enterprise Vault over Microsoft 365. 

If you were doing mailbox archiving AND journaling, then a lot of the data in the journal is also in the mailbox archive.  If you are like many companies, and you migrate all of the mailbox archive data to Exchange Online, you might consider not migrating all the Journal Archive data to Exchange Online as well.  You should consider only migrating the difference between what is in the mailbox archives, and what is in the Journals.  This is how our customer is reducing the amount of Journal data to migrate by a whopping 80%. 

**Numbers reflect one customer’s experience. Actual percentage will vary.

So, how can you determine what is in the Journal Archives, but not the Mailbox Archives?   

The best way to uniquely identify a message in Enterprise Vault (or any other messaging system), it to use the Internet Message ID.  This is guaranteed to be globally unique for all messages based on an international standard developed decades ago for email.*

It isn’t a trivial task getting this information from Enterprise Vault, but it can be retrieved via the API. This is just one of the many attributes that we store in Archive Accelerator Catalog. Once the archives have been inventoried by the Catalog, this information can be used to identify the messages in the Journal archives that are not also in the Mailbox Archives. The pseudo query to do this looks like: 

Select Items 
From (All Journal Archives)
Where Item.Recipient = ‘user1@domain.com’ 
And Item Not in (User1 Mailbox Archive)

In practice, you will likely find the same item in multiple journal archives, so the actual query includes a clause to de-dup those also. 

As I mentioned earlier, Veritas Compliance and e-Discovery options are arguably better than the native Microsoft 365 offerings. We’re impressed with the direction Veritas is going with their Information Governance products, and the new Veritas Advanced Supervision compliance offering is well worth a look.  

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Information-Governance/Regulators-Mean-Business-Who-s-Supervising-Your-Data/ba-p/875989

Vault Solutions has been adding value to Enterprise Vault for over 13 years, so whether you decide to stay or migrate, we may be able to help! 

*At first thought, many assume the information you need to do this is in the Enterprise Vault database tables.  To uniquely identify an item in Enterprise Vault, you need an Archive ID and a Saveset ID.  The Archive ID tells you which archive it is in, such as ‘John Smith’s Mailbox Archive’, or the ‘Journal Archive’.  Let’s assume, for simplicity’s sake, that all Journal data is in the 1 journal archive called ‘Journal Archive’.  You would think that if have an item with a particular Saveset ID in the Journal Archive, but you can’t find that same Saveset ID in John Smith’s archive, that the message isn’t in John Smith’s archive.  But that test doesn’t work, because Enterprise Vault gives each of those messages a unique Saveset ID, even though they are the same message. 

How to REALLY use Enterprise Vault with Office 365

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Collaboration is a key component in business success, and in order to operate seamlessly, many businesses turn to Microsoft Office 365, a collection of Microsoft hosted applications. For Veritas Enterprise VaultTM customers, this most often means utilizing Exchange Online for their email, making it necessary to migrate their Enterprise Vault on-premises mailboxes archives. 

In order to make this move as smooth as possible, there are several things to know and factors to consider, as outlined in a recently released Veritas White Paper. We thought it would be helpful to talk about a few aspects of a migration like this that are critically important:  
• Preparing to migrate and migrating  
• Disabling Mailbox Archiving  
• Journal vs SMTP archiving, and  
• Archive searching post migration

First, one must consider the current Enterprise Vault environment before migrating to Office 365: 
• Is Enterprise Vault Exchange Journal archiving enabled? 
• Is Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archiving for Exchange enabled? 
• Are there mailboxes already migrated to Office 365? 
• Are there mailboxes yet to be migrated to Office 365? 

One of the first things to understand is that out of the box, Enterprise Vault functionalities are restricted when a mailbox is migrated from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online. However, with some planning and the use of additional products, your migration can be smooth and efficient, and users can have unimpeded access to all their email. 

For example, Mailbox synchronization is not applicable for migrated mailboxes, requiring that mailbox synchronization is run before migrating to ensure any policy changes are applied to the mailboxes.  It is possible to migrate the mailboxes with short-cuts intact if you use a product such as Archive Accelerator Restore which can replace the short-cuts with the original items post migration. 

So, the process is typically: 

1. Update the mailbox policy to disable mailbox archiving 
2. Update the Enterprise Vault desktop policy to disable functions such as Store and Restore 
3. Run provisioning to apply the new policies (this must be done before the mailboxes are migrated, since Enterprise Vault won’t be able to provision the mailboxes once in Office 365.) 
4. Migrate the mailboxes.  Note, the user will still have short-cuts, but these short-cuts will continue to work. 
5. Optionally use Archive Accelerator Restore to replace the short-cuts with the original items.  (if you don’t do this step, you may need to keep the Enterprise Vault mailbox archives in place) 
6. Optionally use Archive Accelerator Restore to migrate the messages that didn’t have mailbox short-cuts.  Some companies don’t care about items which the user didn’t have short-cuts for.  Others do this step but place these items in the users Online Archiving in Office 365 if they have that feature.  Another option is to have these messages put into a subfolder in the user’s mail mailbox. 

Restore - easy seamless efficient


An alternative way to migrate the mailbox archives to Office 365 is to use Enterprise Vault (either the supplied PowerShell command Export-EVArchive, or the Export wizard) to export the archived items for each mailbox archive into a .PST file and then import them to Office 365. 

If you have been using Journal archiving, you also need to consider how you will do that going forward. In Office 365 it is not possible to journal data to a Journal mailbox located in Office 365.  Read this article from Microsoft about journaling in Exchange Online. Take note of this paragraph that makes it clear that you can’t use an Exchange Online mailbox as a journaling mailbox: 

“You can’t designate an Exchange Online mailbox as a journaling mailbox. You can deliver journal reports to an on-premises archiving system or a third-party archiving service. If you’re running an Exchange hybrid deployment with your mailboxes split between on-premises servers and Exchange Online, you can designate an on-premises mailbox as the journaling mailbox for your Exchange Online and on-premises mailboxes.”

So, the alternatives are: 

1. Keep an on-premises Exchange server to Journal to 
2. Use the more efficient SMTP archiving feature of Enterprise Vault (this is the recommended course, as it reduces the size of you archives and increased the rate at which Enterprise Vault can archive messages.  It also eliminates the need for an on-premises Exchange Server. 
3. Don’t archive data at all from Office 365, but rather rely on the built-in capabilities of the Office 365 eDiscovery and Compliance features.  While some companies do this, we find that most stick with Enterprise Vault for Compliance and eDiscovery needs.  This is especially the case for financial institutions who typically insist on keeping a separate copy of the data, often on WORM storage. 

Regardless of how you archive your journals, many customers want to give the ability to search archives to their end users. To achieve this goal, our product, Archive Accelerator Enterprise Search, allows the end user to directly and securely search their archived emails contained in SMTP or journal archives. This activity is restricted to only those messages they have sent or received.  It allows users to view all their messages, even those that have been deleted from their mailbox. It also provides a way for users with the correct permissions to view another users email.  

Enterprise Search - direct secure efficient


It is true that some Enterprise Vault functionality is restricted after migrating on-premise Exchange mailboxes to Office 365, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Short-cuts can be restored, end users can search ALL their email from one easy-to-use location, and email can still be journaled.

In summary, make sure you prepare before migrating so you can avoid some of the pitfalls that have complicated other companies’ migrations.

Are you ready to take the next step and talk about how we can help make your migration to Office 365 seamless?

Yes! Let’s talk!

Watch & Learn: Archive Accelerator Export Demo

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Exporting data from Enterprise Vault Mailbox Archives or Journal Archives can be overwhelming – especially if you have a ton of messages to move – but either way, it doesn’t have to derail your day-to-day work! Hard to believe? Watch this short demo and see for yourself!

In this recent demo video, you can watch Dave compare two methods: using Enterprise Vault alone, “out of the box”, and using EV in conjunction with Archive Accelerator Export from Vault Solutions.

Beginning by using Enterprise Vault alone to export files from your EV Archives, you can use the wizard to export your data to .PST files. This works well when you have a handful of files to be moved, but if you have thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of messages to move, this is tedious and will eat up your week, let alone your day!

This is where Archive Accelerator Export comes in. You select your archives to export, and monitor your progress. Simple as that!

But what if you need a bit more control over your export? AA Export comes with Filtered Export, which gives you the ability to export data from your EV internal archives for the targeted user. This is quite simply as easy as creating a target. You then select those targets for export, and Export puts them in the job list where you can continue to monitor progress.

How can it possibly export that many messages? And that efficiently? Dave shares this and more in the video above. Make sure you take 7 minutes and check it out, and look here for additional info about upcoming enhancements!