Enterprise Vault FSA 9.03 Internet Explorer Shortcuts Question

have you had a look at FSAUtility.exe? page 143 of Utilities.pdf which comes with the EV documentation. it should have everything you need to do what you're asking.

Hi there,

Had a look. The  -t command looks to be the parameter I am after. I'm assuming this will work on both Internet shortcut archived files and placeholders too?

Hi,

As I understand, you already have IE shortcuts to files - which you want to replace with regular placeholders itself.   

So you have two choices:

a) Restore archived files (using FSAUtility.exe -t option)  and re-archive them. The re-archive operation will convert these files to regular placeholders.

b) You can also consider using "Recreating placeholders" option of FSAUtility.exe. This option is called -c option. Use it along with -f.  Read Utilities.pdf for more information.   Try to run this on one of the subfolder first (as trial). If it works well, and solves your problem - then consider using this on the full target.   (This one will be more effiecient as unlike option a, it will not recall all archived content, copy them on local disk, and then re-acrhive)

(I will anyway try this out in my lab and confirm you if option b works well to replce IE shortcuts with file placeholders or not.)

Thanks very much for your response. Once you confirm if it works in the lab I will try it out.

I have just tried this in my lab. And I would like to confirm that "FSAUtility.exe -c" will solve your problem.  No need to use -f.   It will create file placholder for your archived files.    When you use these placholders, they work all fine (retervie the archived item).   In my testing in lab, I have tried this with NTFS share.

While this approach will create placeholders for your archived items,  it will not delete your existing internet link's based shortcuts. You will need to remove them manually.  (To get the list of such shortcuts, you can run "dir *.url /s" on your folder target. And to remove them, you can use "del *.url /s" on folder target).

Hope this info helps.

Hi there,

thanks for your reply. I have tried both the -c and the -t option but without success. I have attached a screenshot of the messages I got with both options.

The -t option appeared to run ok but nothing was brought back to the folder and with the -c it stated there was no items to process despite there being 3 Internet Shortcut archived documents.

Any ideas?

thanks

p.s just a small update i ran -t command against a folder that had a placeholder shortcut rather than internet shortcut and it processed the file ok. It hasn't brought it back immediately. Does the task set against that share have to run before it's brought back?

Hi,

Based on what you have mentioned, and which is visible in your screenshots, following are my observations:

a) You have run -c on one such source folder, for which there is no item (in acrhive).  So no shortcut would get created.  While you can see three internet shorcuts, it does not fully confirms that archived items belong to this folder.  A user can copy/paste these internet shortcut file from one folder to other.     To confirm if there are archived items which belong to this folder, you can use Archive Explorer UI page.  (In shortcut, confirm there are archived items which belong to this folder. Once confirmed, -c option must work.)

b) At the end of -t operation, we should check the XML log (report file).  This file is generated inside {Program Files}\Enterprise Vault\Reports\FSAUtility.  (Based on what you mentioned, this too would have not made any change as "most likely" item does not belong to this folder). 

So can you please confirm from EV's Archive explorer UI that items actually belong to this folder.  Both -c and -t will only work if as per EV records item belong to those folders.

Hi there,

Ok we may have an issue. When the consultant set up our Data Archiving we were on another file server, In the last 6 months this has been migrated to another server but one of my colleagues didn't appreciate we had archived documents on the server and did a robocopy without migrating the placeholders !!!!

Unfortunately the old server has been decommissoned so I guess we are goosed :-( 

Hi,

So that sounds like a new problem all together.  I'll get back to you in a day with some possible solution on this. I have few in mind - but I would not like to suggest you them right away. I'll do the require home work and get back to you.

Hi,

While there is no EV tool that directly support pointing all placeholder from a old server, which does not exist anymore, to a new/existing server.

However there is a simple workaround for this issue. Following needs to be done in the given sequence: (following workaround assumes you still have your old file server listed in VAC as target, along with all its original volumes. On the actual file server is taken away from network):

a) From VAC, note down the exact full name of the old server (FQDN). And also the volume names. 

b) Now either create a new files server with the same exact FQDN in your network again OR from windows Active Directory, give one of your existing file server the exact FQDN name as alias.    (Note: We need this file server temporarily - later you can get rid of it.)

c) Create volumes with same exact names, as noted down in step "a" above.

d) Now Run FSAUtility -c to recreate placeholder on this file server.

e) Once all the folder structure and placeholders are created for all the files on this server, run FSAUtility -pm option to migrate all the placeholders from this server, to the new destination file server.

f) Once you have got all the placeholder migrated to your destination server, you can get rid of the file server added in step "b" above.  By now, your purpose will be archived

Hope it helps. Please leave your feedback.