mail hosting backed up on onedrive - issues

[shebeen]

Hi all, couldn't find a thread with this issue.

Company email service, hosted on afrihost "windows gold package". 12 accounts, nothing fancy but probably been like this for 10+ years (before my time, if not broken don't fix it)

Since we have office365 on all machines I moved people backing up everything to their onedrive (ie. dropbox equivalent) which comes as part of the deal.

Seemed like a bit of nice redundancy to have the outlook .pst files on onedrive, but now 2 of them are playing up as the data files just won't sync with onedrive. Therefore outlook won't operate and working off the webmail service for now.

Can't seem to find a fix here, don't think afrihost is the issue either.
Suggestions welcome because the internet doesn't seem to have a solution for me and I'm at the limit of my It skills!

not against upgrading email systems either.

 

[PsyWulf]

Seemed like a bit of nice redundancy to have the outlook .pst files on onedrive, but now 2 of them are playing up as the data files just won't sync with onedrive. Therefore outlook won't operate

This sounds like a file-in-use issue,could you post the actual errors? You can't sync the PST while outlook (or windows search) is using the file

If you want to back that up in the background use a Shadow-copy aware tool like Duplicati to back up and upload changed blocks

 

[Rickster]

Drag the mails from the PST inbox to the 365 inbox.

If they have decent machines with SSD's you can copy a few 100 at a time. Dont forget about sent items though.

 

[shebeen]

This sounds like a file-in-use issue,could you post the actual errors? You can't sync the PST while outlook (or windows search) is using the file

If you want to back that up in the background use a Shadow-copy aware tool like Duplicati to back up and upload changed blocks

This is just a startup error on outlook - "can't access the data file".
I'll have to look at the workstation again (different branch), but I'm pretty sure that outlook has been closed. And it's not like it hasn't been operating before with onedrive updating in the back ground.

Drag the mails from the PST inbox to the 365 inbox.

If they have decent machines with SSD's you can copy a few 100 at a time. Dont forget about sent items though.

We don't have 365 mail, just plain outlook which then gets the mail smtp from afrihost. I'm thinking of converting to the 365 mail (exchange?) and cancelling afrihost as our mail provider. staff won't notice the difference but will have way more storage and one less bill to pay.

 

[PsyWulf]

This is just a startup error on outlook - "can't access the data file".
I'll have to look at the workstation again (different branch), but I'm pretty sure that outlook has been closed. And it's not like it hasn't been operating before with onedrive updating in the back ground.

Again, you're not providing enough info,there is always a reason. And because something worked one way before doesn't mean it will work in every situation

 

[Rickster]

Backing up PST's to onedrive is a no no, if you have a 20GB PST and you get one new email to that PST, then onedrive will need to backup the entire 20GB.

I suggest getting an external hard drive and manually backing them up every X weeks and telling onedrive to ignore the outlook files folder.

 

[shebeen]

Again, you're not providing enough info,there is always a reason. And because something worked one way before doesn't mean it will work in every situation

Agreed, I'm not entirely sure there is much more to tell.
looks like it is actually on MS 365



then it just can't find the data file. (which onedrive says is now synced)

Backing up PST's to onedrive is a no no, if you have a 20GB PST and you get one new email to that PST, then onedrive will need to backup the entire 20GB.

I suggest getting an external hard drive and manually backing them up every X weeks and telling onedrive to ignore the outlook files folder.

I think you're right there. going to move the .pst file off the onedrive folder.

 

[Sagax]

From the looks of things it would appear that the pst file has been corrupted.
I also agree that hosting pst files on Onedrive is a really bad idea for the following reasons: Outlook generally performs a file system lock on pst files for exclusive access as it is essentially a database file and Onedrive constantly monitors files and then requires access to the files when it needs to synchronise the changes. So you have two applications competing for exclusive access to the same file. This can lead to problems and corruption of the pst files, in which case Outlook generally fails to open the pst file.

You can try and fix the affected PST files by running the SCANPST.exe application found under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 (for the 64-bit version, use C:\Program Files (x86) for the 32-bit version). It will then create a duplicate pst file and try to repair the damage for you.

Business packages of Microsoft 365 generally gives you a mailbox of 50GB and an online archive of 50GB (100GB mailbox space in total) for each licensed user that should be sufficient in most cases. Only things you need to do are to activate the functionality and then set up proper retention policies to move the items older than say, 2 years, to the archive mailbox and to clear out items older than 7 years (or however long your company's policy on email retention is). So in my opinion it would also be more sensible from a technology point of view to move away from legacy mail setups that use POP/SMTP along with PST's, even if they are "not broken".

Not sure whether you are aware of this, so I am going to mention it for you to have a look at: If your environment is on a domain you can look for administrative templates under C:\Program Files\Microsoft OneDrive\<latest version>\adm on any machine with Onedrive installed which you can add to your GPO central repository. Onedrive.admx goes into the root of the PolicyDefinitions folder in the SYSVOL\<domain FQDN>\Policies folder on the DC and Onedrive.adml goes into the en-US folder, also present in PolicyDefinitions. You will then get an Onedrive option under the Administrative Templates section in the GPO editor with additional settings for Onedrive that can be set, both under the Computer and User configurations (it has different settings for each). Note: if the PolicyDefinitions folder doesn't exist then you are using the older administrative template functionality on the DC which will have to be upgraded first for the above to work.

Also, file type exclusions can be defined under Sharepoint Online Admin Center > Settings > Onedrive > Sync (usually at the bottom of the list) on the M365 admin portal if you are using a business package. Keep in mind that it tends to generate alerts on clients when enabled and blocked files are present, so it might cause confusion for users and unnecessary helpdesk calls if configured without prior user training. You can use that option to exclude PST's and OST's from being synchronised to Onedrive.

 

[shebeen]

From the looks of things it would appear that the pst file has been corrupted.
I also agree that hosting pst files on Onedrive is a really bad idea for the following reasons: Outlook generally performs a file system lock on pst files for exclusive access as it is essentially a database file and Onedrive constantly monitors files and then requires access to the files when it needs to synchronise the changes. So you have two applications competing for exclusive access to the same file. This can lead to problems and corruption of the pst files, in which case Outlook generally fails to open the pst file.

You can try and fix the affected PST files by running the SCANPST.exe application found under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\root\Office16 (for the 64-bit version, use C:\Program Files (x86) for the 32-bit version). It will then create a duplicate pst file and try to repair the damage for you.

Business packages of Microsoft 365 generally gives you a mailbox of 50GB and an online archive of 50GB (100GB mailbox space in total) for each licensed user that should be sufficient in most cases. Only things you need to do are to activate the functionality and then set up proper retention policies to move the items older than say, 2 years, to the archive mailbox and to clear out items older than 7 years (or however long your company's policy on email retention is). So in my opinion it would also be more sensible from a technology point of view to move away from legacy mail setups that use POP/SMTP along with PST's, even if they are "not broken".

Not sure whether you are aware of this, so I am going to mention it for you to have a look at: If your environment is on a domain you can look for administrative templates under C:\Program Files\Microsoft OneDrive\<latest version>\adm on any machine with Onedrive installed which you can add to your GPO central repository. Onedrive.admx goes into the root of the PolicyDefinitions folder in the SYSVOL\<domain FQDN>\Policies folder on the DC and Onedrive.adml goes into the en-US folder, also present in PolicyDefinitions. You will then get an Onedrive option under the Administrative Templates section in the GPO editor with additional settings for Onedrive that can be set, both under the Computer and User configurations (it has different settings for each). Note: if the PolicyDefinitions folder doesn't exist then you are using the older administrative template functionality on the DC which will have to be upgraded first for the above to work.

Also, file type exclusions can be defined under Sharepoint Online Admin Center > Settings > Onedrive > Sync (usually at the bottom of the list) on the M365 admin portal if you are using a business package. Keep in mind that it tends to generate alerts on clients when enabled and blocked files are present, so it might cause confusion for users and unnecessary helpdesk calls if configured without prior user training. You can use that option to exclude PST's and OST's from being synchronised to Onedrive.

Thank you, I think we are actually going to move mail server to ms365.

I did resolve it and the underlying issue was having the PST backed up on onedrive. (I now know why this is a no no).
For reference the most useful info I really got was here (not only this direct link, but the ones linked from it)

Moving my pst-file to another location - MSOutlook.info

How can I move the Outlook pst-file from its default location to another more convenient location?

www.msoutlook.info

What was holding the whole PST file move, was that i couldn't actually start Outlook to fix things. I didn't know that you can run it in "safe mode" which is what i did and shift the registry of the files and then it started up fine (and then updated the inbox as we had been on the webmaiil interface for a week or so).