Public Folders

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Once a month I have to update My Documents with all files added to Exchange by various employees. It is very tedious to go through each folder for files added during the month and I often miss those who were added in previous months but updated during the current month. Is there a way to copy all these files in Windows?

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You can backup public folders with any backup program. That’s the easiest way to get the information out of the public folder store. What you can do with them after that is a matter between you and your archiving program.

What exactly are you trying to do here? It sounds like you are periodically copy files (office documents? graphics? executables? viruses?) that your users have added to some folders in the publci store, and making a copy of these files in your local “My Documents” folder. Is this correct? It would probably be more helpful for a solution if you would detail more of the process and what you are trying to accomplish here.

Hope This Helps

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That is pretty much what I need to do. There are four of us that, from our different offices, regularly add new files (office documents) to the public folders. My hard disk is used as back-up #1 and each month I have to copy all folders/files from my hard disk to a cd as a 2nd back-up. At this point I go through every folder and sub-folder of the public files and check for any files added during the current month. One problem is that this takes way too long and the second is that we’ve noticed that when someone simply opens and updates a file on Exchange, the date remains the same as when the original document was added to the public folders so more often than not I don’t end up with the most recent version on my hard disk.

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Can you use Advanced Search and look for a modification date > 6/30/2005? (I don’t have any similar folders to test on, sorry.)

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Thanks for the tip. I’ll try it as soon as I have some time this week.

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You ought to look in the TechEd section at Exchange Messaging Outlook Jun 9 2005. Public folders are not going to be enhanced anymore. The current MS plan is that Public Folders are going to be deprecated with the next Exchange server release (currently called Exchange 12) and removed with the following release (exchange 13). MS is trying to give people a lot of advance warning and is encouraging sites to migrate to Sharepoint. If you have Windows 2003 server you have Windows Sharepoint Service included. More information can be found at Windows Server 2003 Home.

Joe

--Joe

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Thanks for that infor Joe,

I noticed a note about “deprecating” public folders in “Exchange 12” but I didn’t know what they were referring to since I wasn’t sure what “exchange 12” was supposed to be.

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Thanks for the tip. We will be prepared for this eventuality.

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I was going to suggest using a “Search Folder” on your public folders, but I can only seem to get this to work on my local mailbox. Too bad.

Sounds like you are using Public Folders to act as a file manager. It wasn’t really designed for this, and so you will probably continue to give you problems, since the normal tools that a person would use to administer files on a share, won’t work here.

The other problem is backup. Since the Public Folder store is one big database file (that is usually open for editing), you can’t just pull the indivual files out with a standard backup program. Some backup programs can use a MAPI interface (so it can see all the files and messages as files and messages instead of one big database file), something like that might help you. These tools are colloquically called “Brick-level backup” (and are also not widely recomended).

One thing that you could do is just copy the entire fileset to your local drive, and then use a good backup or file management program to make sure you can find the latest version of the files.

Also, check http://www.slipstick.com[/url%5D to see if any of the tools listed there might help.

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