Journaling - PST or something else..

[snootalope]

Curious what others out there are doing for journaling. Is a third party option the best bet (like GFI), or is just as easy to use rules to move journaled messages from the journal inbox to a pst stored on a dedicated piece of disk.

We're not a huge company, just over 100 mailboxes currently consuming about 50GB of space. I've been tasked with enabling journaling with a retention somewhere in the 5 year area. My first thought was just create the journal mailbox, setup a pst, and use rules to move those journaled messages to the pst. However, I'm thinking that the size of the pst after a few years could be absolutely enormous and could cause problems. However, we'd like to keep this totally separate from our GFS backup scheme, so we never have to worry about backup tapes and all.

I'm sure there's easy ways to go about this, just curious what others are doing. I'd appreciate any advice!

 

[58sniper]

How are you going to move the messages to a .pst from the journal?

A third party archiving solution would be best. Think about it - if it's journaled, it's subject to eDiscovery requests (as is data in ANY .pst file ANYWHERE in your environment). Now - how are you going to search all of those .pst files?

I'm not a fan of .pst files or journaling. I would recommend steering clear of both if possible. Journaling causes extra work for your mail server, including additional storage. Why not just put a solution into place that archives mail, makes it available to the user, and gives you an ediscovery solution?

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

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