Summary: Rackspace is currently recovering and exporting customers' data from the databases on the hosted Exchange Servers to PST format. They will provide access to the PST file soon and let customers download them on their local system. After the download, you may import the PSTs to your user's account on Microsoft 365 via Network Upload or Drive Shipping method. You may also use an Outlook to Microsoft 365 migratory tool to directly import the PST files to Microsoft 365 with complete integrity and without the risk of corruption or data loss. The software can help you quickly restore access to the historical and recent emails to the users.
Rackspace has shared an update informing the customers about the latest developments and updates on what they are doing behind the scenes to recover and restore customers’ data. In this blog, we have shared the crux of what they are doing in response to the ransomware attack.
Rackspace has currently restored its systems in an isolated environment. Their experts have installed CrowdStrike’s endpoint detection and monitoring tool—Falcon on every impacted server for enhanced visibility across the environment.
They removed the malicious files and ran additional scans to check and ensure that each server is clean. The clean servers are then released with Falcon installed on them in a new environment—ready for the next stage.
Server Recovery
After validating each server, the team of internal experts recovered data from the affected Hosted Exchange servers. As of now, the process of data recovery from affected servers is complete.
Deploying New Environment
Clean servers, with CrowdStrike Falcon installed on them, are placed into an isolated clean environment—away from the rest of the Rackspace network.
Once the cybersecurity experts validate the servers, they will be ready to be deployed and released in the new environment for data extraction.
Data Extraction
Rackspace has set up an automation to extract customers’ data from the database files (EDBs) on their Hosted Exchange Servers. The data is extracted from the Exchange database (EDB) files to individual PST files for each customer account. These files are then moved to the staging environment for data restoration.
However, the restoration is currently in the initial phase and their experts are currently testing the possibilities to successfully transfer and restore data from the PST files.
They also stated that not every PST file will be recoverable as some of them might be corrupt due to their large size. For your information, PST files are sensitive and prone to damage or corruption when they are large or oversized.
However, they are maintaining additional secure copies of the customer data for redundancy. Thus, in case of PST corruption, customers can use the backups to restore missing data.
Rackspace will soon provide their customers with their PST files through a secure portal. If you are affected by the Rackspace outage and waiting for your users’ mailbox data to be released, Rackspace will notify you once the PST files are available for download.
Final Thoughts
Once you have the PST files downloaded on your system, you can send them to respective users and ask them to import the PST file into their Microsoft 365 profile in Outlook through the Import Export wizard. You as an administrator may also follow the Network Upload or Drive Shipping method to import PST files into Microsoft 365.
However, if you want to avoid the hassle of importing PST files manually, you can use an Outlook to Microsoft 365 migrator software, such as Stellar Migrator for Outlook. The software can help you import the PST files of all your users directly into the mailboxes on the Microsoft 365 tenant in a few clicks—with minimal effort and time.
All you need to do is select the PST file of the user, scan it, and then enter the Microsoft 365 credentials to import the PST file into the Microsoft 365 mailbox. This way you can quickly restore the emails of all your users.
