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The eMag Link Monthly Articles

Exchange Server™ Recovery: Extracting the Evidence from EDB and PST Files
Media Checkout and Freeze

Exchange Server™ Recovery: Extracting the Evidence from EDB and PST Files

The explosive growth of email as evidence is quickly changing the litigation landscape. A comprehensive electronic litigation support service is required to provide the best legal/technical defense against pending litigation in order to prevent fines, sanctions and loss of public trust. In order to achieve a comprehensive electronic litigation strategy, companies must be able to restore, search, filter and consolidate data and files from emails from virtually any type of media in the quickest and most accurate manner possible. Recently an eMag partner found themselves in this exact situation.

Irregularities had been found and emails from the custodians both past and present were required as evidence. The historical data had been stored on back-up tapes and there were issues concerning extracting the evidence (*.edbs and *.psts) in a timely manner and the partner realized that they could not produce this evidence in a timely fashion. eMag was called in to help support the service.

The complete rapid response service provided by eMag involved building an exchange server and moving equipment, software tools and people to another country, all within a drop of the hat's notice. We were tasked with providing the data restoration and extraction expertise, and within 2 days our staff of being notified of the request, were on-site busy extracting the 4TB of back-up data and 1TB of e-mail data from the customers tape media. This was quickly condensed into 15GB of responsive data after de-duplicating 700,000 e-mails, and within 7 days the data was ready for the investigation of the content.

While this is not typical of the type of work we encourage our clients to do, it again shows that we are exceptionally capable of rising to any demand for help and assistance literally on-demand. Our long consultancy heritage, combined with our strengths in the litigation support market allow us to travel to sensitive locations and help customers when the data cannot, for whatever reason, leave the current location. The flexibility this level of service provides means that regardless of the challenge, if you need help, we can be there for you.

Learn more about our Exchange Server Recovery services, or contact us today to learn how eMag can help you support or formulate your litigation support strategy.

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Media Checkout and Freeze

One of the new features in MediaMerge/TMS 1.5 is media checkout and freeze. Checkout is the ability to temporarily transfer the possession of media, perhaps to some third party. Freeze prevents the movement or expiration of a backup, and MM/TMS has the most exhaustive freeze/checkout facility anywhere.

What if the SEC wishes to examine the backups of half your servers for 1999 at length and orders you not to destroy any of the data on those backups for the next 24 months? You were going to scratch those volumes at the 5-year point. What do you do now? Ignore half the instructions from your TMS for the next year? You will have lost a significant amount of control of your tape inventory by that time.

Using eMag's MM/TMS, you have an easy solution. You simply select those backups, and freeze them. MM/TMS will not move media listed as frozen. If configured to do so, it will also set the media never to expire (try to explain to a GS-9 how data simply disappears when the volume expires). The media will stay frozen until you explicitly 'un-freeze' it. Only then MM/TMS will perform any overdue actions, such as vault movements. Without this feature you would have to keep track of all the involved media manually.

Imagine that your company is involved in a lawsuit, and your counsel has requested some of your vaulted media. A month after delivering the media, you have an emergency need to do a mission-critical restore. Your operator calls the secure offsite vendor to return the media, and it is not there. No one remembers that the media is collecting dust in your corporate law firm's closet. With MM/TMS you would know that that backup was checked out and who is in possession.

In summary our freeze/checkout allows you to handle the inevitable situations that arise when you must make exceptions to your normal vaulting and retention policies. Without this feature, you must revert back to using notepads and Excel spreadsheets - and risk a high probability of failure. Isn't this the kind of adventure that caused companies to buy a TMS to avoid? Contact us today or learn more about MM/TMS.

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Article by eMag Solutions. For more articles on eDiscovery and Data Restoration, subscribe to our e-mail Newsletter by sending a blank email to newsletter@emaglink.com or by going to http://www.emaglink.com/.