Public Folder & Enterprise Vault Case StudyIAEA:
when the public folders are broken.

Organisation

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Sector

International organisation

Source

Exchange public folders and Enterprise Vault

Destination

Shared mailboxes · PST for retired data

Scale

2 TB of public folder and EV data

Result

Enterprise Vault decommissioned

The situation

The IAEA used Enterprise Vault to archive both user mailboxes and public folders. Years earlier, an upgrade had failed, and the public folder databases had never replicated correctly since. That left the agency with a nasty combination: public folders full of EV shortcuts, and folders too inconsistent for those shortcuts to be rehydrated in place.

Until the data was out, Enterprise Vault couldn't be retired. Microsoft had been unable to repair the public folders well enough to export them. The agency needed a way to get its data out of both Exchange and Enterprise Vault, quickly and without relying on the broken folders.

How the project ran

1. Discover both sides. In Exchange, discovery ran against each public folder database, listing folders with their message counts, shortcut counts, sizes, owners and permissions. In Enterprise Vault, it listed the archived folders with their archived item counts and sizes.
2. Find the owners. Reports identified each root folder and its owner, so the agency could decide where every branch should go.
3. Treat Enterprise Vault as the source of truth. Because the Exchange copies were unreliable, data was exported directly from Enterprise Vault rather than by rehydrating shortcuts in broken folders.
4. Land it where it's used. Content still in use went straight into a set of shared mailboxes. Content that wasn't needed day to day was exported to PST and kept, in case it was ever required.

Results

• 2 TB of public folder and Enterprise Vault data recovered
• Live content moved into shared mailboxes, organised around how teams use it
• Retired content preserved in PST rather than lost
• Enterprise Vault decommissioned

What this means for your project

Public folders archived into Enterprise Vault live in two places at once, and if either side is damaged, the usual tools give up. Working directly from the vault, with discovery on both sides to show what exists and who owns it, gets data out even when Exchange itself can't be trusted. It's also a reminder to check the health of your public folders before you plan an EV exit, not during it.

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