As mentioned earlier by JW2 legal hold as a severe impact on the recoverable items versioning folder (part of dumpster 2.0). Have you validated the journal mailbox is not on hold?
One way to determine if the journal mailbox is filling the dumpster is to use a tool such as MFCMAPI. From this create a profile to the journal mailbox, you can then view the folder content of the mailbox - this shows you the folders you don't normally see in Outlook. You should be able to find the Recoverable Items folder which will have three sub folders (off the top of my head Deletions,Purges,Versions). Check the PR_CONTENT_COUNT for each folder. If the mailbox is on legal hold the purges and versioning folder could well have lots of items in them.
![](https://vox.veritas.com/connect/imagebrowser/view/image/2022401/_original)
EV doesn't differ in journal and mailbox archiving in the manner it deletes items.
Thanks
Karl