Forum Discussion

sandrine_goetha's avatar
sandrine_goetha
Level 6
4 years ago

Delete expired items question

Hello,

I have a question regarding deleting the expired items.

After years and years without doing it, the new archiving politic changed, they now want to do it. This means I'll have few TB to delete ( I'm aware it will take me ages....).

We are using EV 14.1 with exchange 2016

My question is the following : how does the delete works ?

- it takes one archive and delete everything till the date, than doe the next one

- it takes one archive and delete everything till the 2000 limit ( like during an archive run ), than the next one.

-it delete items based on their age : the older first than the next one and this over all archives ( I hope this one is clear).

Thank you for your answer

Sandrine

  • Marcde's avatar
    Marcde
    Moderator
    4 years ago

    Hi Sandrine,

    are you speaking of storage expiry or shortcut deletion? 

    The former one can be started using a run now operation or a configured schedule. I'd always recommend running at least one report run now before acutally performing anything to get an idea of how much it is going to delete and if this is what you expect to see.

    Afterwards you can schedule a daily timeframe in which EV is supposed to run storage expiry and it should bring down the "backlog" more and more.

    In regards to how this is done internally, unfortunately I am not completely certain.

    Please keep in mind, that you might see some heavier transaction log growth when deletion is being done.

     

    Regards

    Marc

    • sandrine_goetha's avatar
      sandrine_goetha
      Level 6
      4 years ago

      Thank you mark for your answer.

      I'm speaking of storage expiry and about how it is done and the consideration I am well aware of all of them.I just want to know how this is done internally.

       

      Regards

      Sandrine

      • GertjanA's avatar
        GertjanA
        Moderator
        4 years ago

        Hello Sandrine,

        Few TB? I started last November, expiring more than 130TB. (I hope :-). Anyway. I had the same question. 

        EV does expiry on archives sequentially. it deletes oldest items first, 1 archive at the time. You can sort of tweak the expiry, (12.5 and up) by: properties EV server, tab advanced, dropdown storage, 5th from the top (number of threads used to delete items during storage expiry process). I am not sure if it helps in improving performance, but I uncheck the 'deleted items automatically' box when an archive is either not yet allowed to expire (long retention), or the items in the archive are all on legal hold. What helps in my case is that the VS expiring are not getting new data. I run expiry 12 hours (from 18:00 to 06:00). I use the usage page to get a generic VS overview, and below powershell to get the itemcount per archive. Stick that in excel, and you can get your 'what expires daily' numbers. You need to look for event 7085 in the EV Eventlog to see what expired. 

        In my environment, it runs ok.

        The PSscript (copy in a txt file, rename to ps.1, run in powershell on an EV server.) YOu need to adjust the output folder, but that is easy.

        $cmapi = New-Object -ComObject EnterpriseVault.ContentManagementAPI
        $as = $cmapi.Archives
        $as.Computer = "localhost"
        $as.Get()

        $as | Format-Table Name, ItemCount > D:\Scripts\GetArchiveItemCount\archivelist.txt