Billions of emails moved …with 0.00% failures

Posted by Liam Neate on Jun 19, 2013 Last updated Jan 07, 2022

At Transvault we don’t just care about the speed of your migration, we care about the QUALITY of your migrated data. Did we move everything you wanted to move successfully? Did we flag and fix any broken emails? Did we make sure what we moved was available to the right people and in the right place?

By our estimates our flagship product, Transvault Migrator, is being used to migrate in excess of 50 billion emails.  Pretty good going, especially when the average migration results in very few failed emails. In one healthcare email archive migration project just 1 out of 50 million emails refused to migrate. Our Transvault partners have also achieved some great results with technically complex archives, such as AXS-One.

How does Transvault Migrator do it?

It doesn’t trust your archive:  

No offence, but the fact is, over time, archive databases get out of shape, storage gets corrupted, ‘buggy’ versions are applied, data gets converted and imported from other systems.  Your users may have already complained that they can’t find emails that they KNOW are in your archive – that could be because your archive index is corrupted in places.  Some archives, like AXS-One, hold very little meta-data to describe what’s in the archive.  All these scenarios and more conspire to make migrating your email really challenging.   That’s why before any migration starts, Transvault Migrator performs a full analysis what’s REALLY in your archive.

It doesn’t move broken emails:  

In fact, Transvault Migrator is probably a bit too fussy when it moves your data.  If an email fails a test (and we run at least 20 checks), it’s automatically re-tried.  If it still fails, it gets flagged so it can be reviewed later. Even if the problem is something very site-specific and unique to your organization, part of the Transvault service is to try and fix problematic emails if at all possible.  There’s no point in moving it if it is useless to you ‘at the other side’.

It keeps ‘legal’ happy:

It’s highly likely that your legal department will want to know that everything has been moved correctly – and want the proof.  So, in addition to moving your data as a single, end-to-end transfer (no interim PST files for us!), each and every item migrated is fully audited, any errors are reported and chain-of-custody is assured.

It lets you be defensibly choosy in what you move: 

Transvault Migrator lets you perform highly-targeted, policy-based data migrations, without having to perform costly, time-consuming and intensive data analysis. For example:

– Only move items less than 10 years old for defined users – Move emails into user’s primary or archive mailboxes depending on age – Migrate leavers’ data into a departmental mailbox with appropriate access rights

It keeps users happy too:  

As well as checking your archive, Transvault Migrator takes into consideration the state of shortcuts (stubs) in your users’ mailboxes.  Many archives don’t keep track of the status of mailbox shortcuts.  So, in addition to converting or removing shortcuts when you move,  Transvault ensures you:

– DON’T migrate items where users have deleted the corresponding shortcut – Put items into the right folders (i.e. where your users last put their email) – Make sure that shared shortcuts are still accessible to all the right people

In short, end users don’t get any nasty surprises when you migrate.

It does it quickly:

Last, but not least, when you move your emails with Transvault you can rest assured you are not only getting the most dependable and proven solution,  you are also getting the most efficient solution.  Depending on your environment Migrator can move in excess of 2TB of data a day, and that’s for an end-to-end migration with no interim PST files and with full integrity checking of your email records.