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mjkqb's avatar
mjkqb
Level 4
14 years ago

Safety Copies

Just wondering what some of you are doing as far as Safety Copies. Do you have it enabled? What are the pros and cons of using them.

Thanks

Best Practice
Enterprise Vault
Information Governance
  • JesusWept3's avatar
    JesusWept3
    14 years ago

    Safety Copies are usually required by most companies in case of data loss

    Pros:
    If Enterprise Vault has crashed, and people have archived items after the last succesful back up, the user will still have their email that you can flip back to a regular email and then have it rearchive

    Cons:
    Can generate some user confusion because they are told they can't move or delete their email, when in fact they can, and if they do it will generate errors on EV when EV Attempts to find the item and isn't there any more


    So lets say if you have Immediately after archive, what it will do is replace the item in the inbox with the shortcut straight away, if the storage then crashes and you can only restore from last night, the user will be left with a shortcut and not have the items in the ev vault stores, meaning you'd need to do an exchange restore to get the items back

    Most people keep it on After backup (immediately for journaling) because with journaling you can't usually wait for the backup to take place.

    If you have a centera with replication you can do after backup, where after backup means after its replicated which is a lot quicker than waiting for the archive bits to clear.

    Also you could do flash backups every hour and use the IgnoreArchiveBitTrigger file and then you can get pending items switched to full archived items within a couple of hours etc

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  • JesusWept3's avatar
    JesusWept3
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    Safety Copies are usually required by most companies in case of data loss

    Pros:
    If Enterprise Vault has crashed, and people have archived items after the last succesful back up, the user will still have their email that you can flip back to a regular email and then have it rearchive

    Cons:
    Can generate some user confusion because they are told they can't move or delete their email, when in fact they can, and if they do it will generate errors on EV when EV Attempts to find the item and isn't there any more


    So lets say if you have Immediately after archive, what it will do is replace the item in the inbox with the shortcut straight away, if the storage then crashes and you can only restore from last night, the user will be left with a shortcut and not have the items in the ev vault stores, meaning you'd need to do an exchange restore to get the items back

    Most people keep it on After backup (immediately for journaling) because with journaling you can't usually wait for the backup to take place.

    If you have a centera with replication you can do after backup, where after backup means after its replicated which is a lot quicker than waiting for the archive bits to clear.

    Also you could do flash backups every hour and use the IgnoreArchiveBitTrigger file and then you can get pending items switched to full archived items within a couple of hours etc

  • gmackinn's avatar
    gmackinn
    Level 4
    14 years ago

    We always use safety copy mechanism, none of our custermers want the risk of data loss although I'm struggling to set it up with a EMC Data Domain as the data domain replication does not remove the archive bit or appear to have the facility to run a script that creates the trigger file. I think we might need to integrate the replication with Netbackup and get netbackup to run a script that creates the trigger file.

  • Rob_Wilcox1's avatar
    Rob_Wilcox1
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    I'd say that in a production world, it should be enabled.

     

    All my test environments don't have it enabled however, unless I need to do something specific around "pending" items.

  • MichelZ's avatar
    MichelZ
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    You could write a script which either parses the autosupport messages for "replication lag", and then you could write the trigger file based on that, or you could automatically SSH into the box and parse the replication lag from the command line.

    Cheers
    Michel

  • JesusWept3's avatar
    JesusWept3
    Level 6
    14 years ago

    just as a matter of interest have you tried restarting the storage service?
    I'm pretty sure i remember something about storagefilewatch not kicking off when taken out of backup mode via script, it would only do it after the restart of the storage service.

     

  • mjkqb's avatar
    mjkqb
    Level 4
    14 years ago

    Well darn it. I am still in test with this. Just finished upgrade to 9.0.1. from 8.0.4

    I switched to Safety Copies and now after running a couple of backups the Safety copies don't go away. I use a  script to put the Vault in and clear backup mode. It was working correctly before the upgrade. What am I missing?

    I am also configured not to create shortcuts. Everything is accessed through the Virtual Vault.

    Using Backup Exec 2010. Full and incremental (reset archive bit).

  • mjkqb's avatar
    mjkqb
    Level 4
    14 years ago

    Yes. I tried that. The partition is still showing 4 unsecured items.

    Question: Do I need the Enterprise Vault Agent to back up the Vault stores? This was working when we were backing this up on a different server. Our backup guy just told me that he was previously using an evaluation version on the other server that probably had all the agents installed. Using 2010 r2 on both servers.

    I was looking at a restore job in Backup Exec and there are no files under Enterpise Vault Stores. This was after a full backup. Which would explain why the saftey copies are still there.