Forum Discussion

karmakoma's avatar
karmakoma
Level 5
12 years ago

Restoring Moved Placeholders

Hi,

We have stopped copying placeholders in our backup strategy as backing them up was pushing the backups past our backup window and as these items are archived (and not deleted) already it seemed like a waste of resources.

We have since discovered that the filing behaviour of some of our staff is to shuffle around archived items into new folders in their own type of archiving/cataloging system.

The issue this creates is if the placeholder or new folders are deleted and we get a request to restore it. We have no backup of those placeholders and cannot easily restore it.

I'm just wondering if my understanding of the problem is correct and if there are any solutions apart from user education and backing up shortcuts again.

 

Thanks.

Backing Up
Enterprise Vault
Information Governance
Restore
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • karmakoma's avatar
    karmakoma
    Level 5
    12 years ago

    Yes but does this not only allow the recreation of placeholders in the folder the were originally archived from?

     

    For example,

    Folder A has some files which have reached the set archiving age and have been archived and replaced with placeholders.

    Sometime later, a user drags this placeholders from Folder A and puts them in a new folder called Folder B.

    A week later someone mistakenly deletes Folder B and all it's place holders. He/She needs this folder and it's items restored.

    In this scenario, as we don't backup placeholders, we can simply restore Folder B and it's contents and the running fsautility -c against Folder B will not recreate the placeholders that were there as they originated from Folder A.

    Or have I got this completely wrong?

  • ZeRoC00L's avatar
    ZeRoC00L
    Level 6
    12 years ago

    You are right that fsautility does not recreate the placeholders in Folder B.

    I don't think any process will, as there is no record of the placeholders.
    What you can do is enable shadow copies, with this you can 'browse' to an older version of a folder and restore files from it.

  • karmakoma's avatar
    karmakoma
    Level 5
    12 years ago

    Thanks for the suggestion. I'll take a look at our shadow copy setup.

  • plaudone's avatar
    plaudone
    Level 5
    12 years ago

    FSA does not have shorcut updates so it only knows the original location where the items were archived so this is why FSAUtility will not work.  

    Do users have access to Archve Explorer?  That would be another alternative to be able to recover the data, but again it would be listed in the original location.  

    You will also run into issues in a DR scenario if backups are not being done on the current placeholders (PH).  If the need to recreate that data from EV occurs then all the data will be created in the original location and not where users moved the data.