Exchange 2010 Litigation Hold
The environment in question is EV 10.4 and Exchange 2010 SP3.
For our mailboxes on litigation hold, the Versions folder in the Exchange dumpster is growing to excessive size especially for mailboxes recently enabled for archiving. It's my understanding that when the archiving task runs, the items applicable to the policy are actually edited to make a shortcut. When a mailbox is on litigation hold, editing an item results in a copy kept in the versions folder. This results in every item archived being also stored in the versions folder of the Exchange dumpster. We have the ability to purge the versions folders by means of a script. Our concern is if an item was legitimately edited for whatever purpose, that edit will be lost. We could use a similar means to export the versions folder then import it into EV to recover space but in theory that will duplicate every item in the user’s archive and the these items may be visible to the user. All things considered, I believe we have two options while an associate is on legal hold. Exclude them from archiving (likely they will wonder why archiving has stopped) or we could routinely purge their versions folders but risk deleting a legitimately edited item. Another thought is to not create shortcuts at all but that removes the seamless aspect of EV in the mailboxes. Advice is greatly appreciated!
I handle Legal Hold a different way.
1. I capture a copy of their current mailbox into the archives
2. Disable deletion from the associated archives
3. If an ongoing case with requirement to capture future emails I add them to a small Exchange Journal policy and use Journal archiving to capture future emails.
I dont' user Exchanges LegalHold processes at all.
Everything EV does will always be an edit
And it really depends on what you are using EV for, Mailbox Management or Compliance?
Compliance should really be accomplished via exchange journaling, but obviously edits won't be caught by Exchange Journaling or what not.
Unfortunately its the way that the product, and actually almost every other archiving product works, especially those dealing with stubs, it a "choose your poison" type of situation unfortunately