Automatically deleting archived mailbox from EV to free up disk space

Hello John,

Unfortunately, you can't use a PS script to delete archives from Enterprise Vault, since is not available. At this point, the only way to delete archives is from the VAC, one by one. Marking archives for deletion from SQL is not supported and you can end deleting archives that you don't want to.

However, if you are deleting the AD user account as well, in the VAC, you can sort the archive's list by 'Bill usage to' and look for the account that just display the SID. Then, you can delete the archives you need.

Also, if you want to delete archives to get more free space in the storage, keep in mind that if you have sharing enabled at the Vault Store level, you might try to delete an archive that is 1 GB on size but at the end, you might get less than 1 GB of free space back in the storage due to the sharing.

I hope this helps.

Hello John,

That doesn't matter because you are deleting an archive which is considered as a force deletion and the archive will get deleted. 

The only exception is if in the retention policy if you have "Prevent deletion of items in this retention category" selected then the archive will reamin Marked for deletion and will not get deleted.

Uncheck this option "Prevent deletion of items in this retention category" if it is checked before deleting the archives.

check the screenshot 

I hope this helps !!!

Refer to the below forum thread

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/need-delete-multiple-archives-enterprise-vault

Agreed with Jesus, deleting archives via SQL/script is not good idea, however you disable archiving for mailbox those are deleted/disable in exchange/AD.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/forums/how-disable-bulk-users-archiving

In future, if these user’s return then it would be easy for you relink with existing archives.

I would also suggested to delete it from admin console..

Once you delete it from admin console the archive will go fin "Marked for deletion".

And when storage expiry runs next it will go head and delete all items associated with that archive from the Database and Physical Vaultstore Partition.

This is the safest way to do it, and will not cause any issue with EV Databases.

I hope this hepls.

If retention of the item is not a concern , you can delete the archive from Vault admin console. But I would suggest you to export the archive to a PST before deleting it from EV , because in case if you have to restore the deleted archive , you would need to do a disaster recovery of EV i.e. need to create a Similar EV test setup , restore the vault store and SQl databases and then extract the information you need.

  The recommended way to Optimize the storage would be configuring Storage Expiry So once the retention period is over the Data gets deleted without any manual intervention.

Admins Ideally Archive the mailbox before deleting it from exchange, so that if needed mailbox can be searched for ediscovery purpose. So when deleting the archive be sure if you really want to deletion of the data.

Many thanks for the clarification people, however my storage policy item was set as forever :-/

Hm.. I guess in this case the only way to delete it is by right clicking it manually one by one.

Do I need to set something before I right click and delete the archive ?