OST's and the Rackspace Breach

thecomputerguy

thecomputerguy

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Thankfully I migrated all my clients off Rackspaces platform years ago but I do have a colleague who has about 700 accounts at Rackspace some being hosted exchange and some people pop/IMAP.

I told him to stop the pop/IMAP crap and move fully to M365 either direct or through Pax8.

This outage sounds like it could be devastating for Rackspace and they may not recover from this. Their platform sucks and apparently their customer support is not even close to what it used to be as they were bought out in 2016.

The people are r/sysadmin are telling everyone to grab all the OST's ASAP.

On to my question, is there a way to grab the individual OST's on user stations and use that as a way of recovering?
 
If you can get Outlook to start you can export the OST as a PST. From there you can import that into Outlook on the new profile. Don't modify the old profile. Start a new one from scratch and import your data there.
 
LOL I feel kinda stupid asking that question now because I already knew the answer but for some reason my brain was correlating what's happening at Rackspace to the old profile in Outlook not opening.

Which is wrong.

And I'm dumb.

Nevertheless, I'll leave the post to remind myself how dumb I can be at a later date.
 
This will be bad if they don't get online quick, I have no doubt December will be busy and probably this week. Luckily, I have time to charge my emergency migration rates.
 
And when clients cry because they only have 1 year down in Outlook, you can blame MS for this default setting. Rackspace will claim it's out of their control what Outlook does.

Kind of a weird situation right now, manage expectations!!!
 
Yeah that default setting will hurt end users. We always...always...slide the bar all the way to the right.
Even easier now with a policy in 365 to manage that automatically.

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Many of my clients have some pretty old small ssd's so I look at that before allowing all email to be downloaded. Just a tip for those helping unmanaged clients.
 
callthatgirl said:
Many of my clients have some pretty old small ssd's so I look at that before allowing all email to be downloaded. Just a tip for those helping unmanaged clients.
Click to expand...

I seem to have a hard time with clients allowing me to setup a retention policy that helps with data file sizes. I find that excessively large OST's can cause issues.

When a client informs me that their standard 50GB mailbox is saying that it's almost full I tell them we need to either upgrade to E3, Change retention to delete stuff older than X years, or enable archiving.

They typically say, WELL I NEED EVERYTHING BACK TO 2009!!!!! WHAT DO YOU MEAN I HAVE TO DELETE

OK then, E3 it is. Then when it happens again we enable archiving.

Then when it happens again we I tell them either we adjust retention or you are buying massively overpriced storage from M$.

So basically "All" emails are typically not an option for me.
 
thecomputerguy said:
They typically say, WELL I NEED EVERYTHING BACK TO 2009!!!!!
Click to expand...

And when I client says this to me, my response is, "Tell me, now, the last time you looked at a piece of email more than 1 year old." Most of them cannot. Most of them can't even recall the last time they looked at a 6-month old message.

Archiving really does exist for a very good reason.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
Yeah that default setting will hurt end users. We always...always...slide the bar all the way to the right.
Even easier now with a policy in 365 to manage that automatically.
Click to expand...
We take the opposite approach. Allowing unlimited sync in my experience causes headaches with people getting large OST file sizes or even hitting the 50GB limit and Outlook performance tanking, especially people who have access to multiple mailboxes. I come from supporting a lot of clients who had On-Prem exchange and they were never used to deleting or archiving anything. Always had tons of issues on Outlook 2010 or earlier. Wasnt until 2013 came along and we could limit sync where it helped these issues.
 
As it's not my data, it's the clients data, it's their choice to have as many gigs of data as they want and far back as long as they want. If they need 2 mailboxes, they get 2 to manage it. If they need 17, they pay for 17. It's our job to tell them the limits of Outlook, Exchange, and when problems will arise. Most of us know Outlook has a limit, many of my clients have way more and want it all, search, perfection, etc. This is when I say get another mbx, no problem, for $6, easy solution.

I just finished a project, handed over to me by a tech who needed my help on configuring almost 1TB to be in one Outlook profile and all on exchange. Yep, took 3 months but that client got 9 mailboxes with 90 gigs each, took 2.5 months to complete and data organized perfectly. The invoice was my largest on record.

yep, email downloaded in Outlook was only 2 weeks lol, search worked perfect.
 
putz said:
We take the opposite approach. Allowing unlimited sync in my experience causes headaches with people getting large OST file sizes or even hitting the 50GB limit and Outlook performance tanking, especially people who have access to multiple mailboxes. I come from supporting a lot of clients who had On-Prem exchange and they were never used to deleting or archiving anything. Always had tons of issues on Outlook 2010 or earlier. Wasnt until 2013 came along and we could limit sync where it helped these issues.
Click to expand...

30 years of doing this, almost 4,000 computers under our command...haven't had issues. We don't underspec horsepower of computers, always aimed for more RAM, faster drives, went for SSDs way early in their years, back in the on-prem Exchange days we built Exchange servers with adequate storage, and users with huge OSTs...with good horsepower computers they run fine.
 
YeOldeStonecat said:
30 years of doing this, almost 4,000 computers under our command...haven't had issues. We don't underspec horsepower of computers, always aimed for more RAM, faster drives, went for SSDs way early in their years, back in the on-prem Exchange days we built Exchange servers with adequate storage, and users with huge OSTs...with good horsepower computers they run fine.
Click to expand...
It's not so much about the horsepower than it is bumping into the OST file limit. Once that happens Outlook won't even load. Ran into this a bunch with Outlook 2010 or earlier. Once sync limits were a thing, I rarely have had to deal with it. Data management comes into play at some point both the client and the server side. MS does have a 100GB limit on mailbox sizes, and believe it or not, I have seen end users hit that. If the client wants to retain every email ever sent or received, IMO there is a different service for that, or they can opt to keep it in online Archive. I've been scorned with having to deal with end users trying to use Outlook as their personal storage system more times than I can count, that I have become pretty stringent when it comes to syncing these large data sets to the client device.
 
putz said:
It's not so much about the horsepower than it is bumping into the OST file limit. Once that happens Outlook won't even load. Ran into this a bunch with Outlook 2010 or earlier. Once sync limits were a thing, I rarely have had to deal with it. Data management comes into play at some point both the client and the server side. MS does have a 100GB limit on mailbox sizes, and believe it or not, I have seen end users hit that. If the client wants to retain every email ever sent or received, IMO there is a different service for that, or they can opt to keep it in online Archive. I've been scorned with having to deal with end users trying to use Outlook as their personal storage system more times than I can count, that I have become pretty stringent when it comes to syncing these large data sets to the client device.
Click to expand...
I can understand M$ putting some sort of limit on it, but honestly.... I think they are a bit too stringent.


The single client I still support has two shared exchange mailboxes. One just shy of 40 GB, the other just over 50GB. I have them provisioned with Exchange Online (Plan 2) which allows them up to 100GB. The current figures represents about.... 4-5 years worth of data. They DO actually have a real (and reasonable) need to keep several years worth, but not 10 years worth, of emails in these two mailboxes. At a point, they'll need to purge data... but it would be nice if... say for example add another $3 per month, per box to be able to shove another 100GB worth in cold storage.
 
putz said:
It's not so much about the horsepower than it is bumping into the OST file limit. Once that happens Outlook won't even load. Ran into this a bunch with Outlook 2010 or earlier. Once sync limits were a thing, I rarely have had to deal with it. Data management comes into play at some point both the client and the server side. MS does have a 100GB limit on mailbox sizes, and believe it or not, I have seen end users hit that. If the client wants to retain every email ever sent or received, IMO there is a different service for that, or they can opt to keep it in online Archive. I've been scorned with having to deal with end users trying to use Outlook as their personal storage system more times than I can count, that I have become pretty stringent when it comes to syncing these large data sets to the client device.
Click to expand...

For us, when Outlook won't load, we know to check the mailbox size. If it's 49.something gigs...a really quick registry edit and BOOM client is back in business. Now, time to determine if an Exchange Online P2 is needed, or go for the online archive.

We have had a very small handful of clients nudge the 100 gig size...at which point, online archive it is, quick and easy with 365.
Way back in the days of on-prem Exchange, I don't recall having any clients nudge the hunned gig size. One or two may have.

I've seen a lot of techs complain that Outlook gets pokey, ornery, slow, search won't work, crashes a lot....when mailboxes get like..30 gigs or more. Shouldn't be a thing at all with decent specs. On those rigs where they complain Outlook is slow or locks up a lot, probably find old spindle drives, and half the RAM the rig should have.
 
I never increase an OST's size. I just delete it, and configure the Exchange account to store less (pulling that slider to the left).
 
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