eDiscovery Daily Blog
Process This! – Close Outlook Before Compressing or Zipping PST Files for Processing: eDiscovery Best Practices
Having recently experienced this with a client, I thought I would revisit this helpful tip. This is one of the tips Tom O’Connor and I will be covering this Friday – E-Discovery Day – on our webcast Murphy’s eDiscovery Law: How to Keep What Could Go Wrong From Going Wrong at noon CST (1:00pm EST, 10:00am PST). Click here to register for Friday’s webcast.
As you may know, at CloudNine (shameless plug warning!), we have an automated processing capability for enabling clients to load and process their own data – they can use this capability to load their data into our review platform. They can even process and load data straight into Relativity using our Outpost for Relativity module.
Regardless whether they load data into CloudNine or Relativity, most of our users are using the processing capability to process emails, usually from Outlook Personal Storage Table (PST) files. Even though increased volumes of social media and other types of electronically stored information, emails are still predominant in eDiscovery. And, for users trying to process and load that data, we get one issue more than any other when it comes to processing those Outlook emails:
They still have Outlook open with the PST file opened when they attempt to upload that PST file or when they try to create a ZIP file containing the Outlook PST.
When that happens, the resulting ZIP file that is created (either by the user or by our client application if the data is not already contained in an archive file) will almost invariably be corrupted or empty. Either way, this will result in a failure during processing of the loaded data – because the data being processed will simply be corrupt.
This is not only true for CloudNine processing, this is also true for any application that you use for processing, such as Law PreDiscovery. So, before attempting to create a ZIP (or RAR or other type of archive) of a PST file (or before you upload it to a platform like CloudNine for processing), make sure that Outlook is closed or at least that the PST file is closed within Outlook. That’s the best way to have a positive “outlook” to discovering emails. Get it? :o)
So, what do you think? Is email still the predominant source of discoverable ESI in your organization? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine. eDiscovery Daily is made available by CloudNine solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscovery Daily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.