Storage Expiry Odd results and unable to expire

Did you schedule expiry to run or do a run now?

Do you happen to have items on Legal Hold?

The SQL query is not exact, there are some caveats

1. Expiry runs to the very second, the query you run now, will yield less results that will run when you expire in several hours.

2. You can set expiry based on modified vs archived date in the retention category
3. If you set prevent deletion on the retention category, nothing will get expired
4. If you set Do Not Expire Items in users archive properties, the items will not expire
5. If you have a Discovery Accelerator and you put items or archvies on hold, those items will not expire
6. It depends on how long you run the expiry for, it might not have enough time to expire items, you can usually tell this by the time the report is generated in the event viewer, if its at the end of the schedule then you need to have more time, if its before the end of the schedule, then it just ran out of things to expire
7. It also depends on the type of storage you have, if you have a Centera in Compliance or a NetApp with snaplock, then you cannot expire items before the archived retention has expired. so if you have a retention of 10 years, and you archive it on a compliance device then you decrease the retention to 6 years, items will not expire until they are at least ten years old.

You can also not expire by Modified date (The sent/received date)

Also if you delete any archives, or users delete archived items AFTER the SQL query is run but BEFORE expiry runs, then that will also change the numbers etc

Thank you.  We are only trying to trim the journal mailbox archive.  We created a new retention category for this purpose only.  Basically changing the timeframe on the category after each expiry. It ran the one time and removed 21 items...  we can't get it to do it again?  Do we need to synchronize or something that changes the category on all items in the journal to the new category?

We have no Legal Holds from 3 years ago.  When we got 21 results, it was a Run Now and we get no results with the schedule expiry.  We have since used the run now and have gotten no results.

Well it all really depends on how far in to 2009 you really started journaling
Today - 34 months is May 9th 2009, is it possible that all those items were archived during the later half of 2009?

Can you run this one for us:

select "ArchiveDate" = left (convert (varchar, ArchivedDate,20),7),
"Count" = count (*)
from saveset
where ArchivedDate between '2009-01-01' and '2009-12-31'
group by left (convert (varchar, ArchivedDate,20),7)
order by "ArchiveDate" Desc

We started the migration in April 2009 and completed the migration in August 2009.  So we should have seen data expire.

2009-12,924974
2009-11,690815
2009-10,844275
2009-09,804413
2009-08,681740
2009-07,560324
2009-06,1555820
2009-05,26628
2009-04,75

What do you mean when you say you created a new retention category?  The new retention category will only apply to newly archived items.  You need to adjust the retention category assigned to the archived items.

Well, when we had the Evault consultant setup our system, he created an unlimited category which applied to the journal and also applied the same category to our Management Staff.  So if we just modify the existing, it will expire all of their email as well.  This is not an option.  I wish we would have known the problems that would cause.  Do you see a way around this?

You can mark the management staff archive to not expire.  On the Advanced tab of the Archive Property page uncheck Delete expired items from the archive automatically.