Symantec Enterprise Vault Archive Vault backup & Virus Scanning best practice

1. Anti-virus exclusions:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH48856

2. For EV Backup Best practice take a look at this:

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/enterprise-vault-backups-best-practice

It will be hard to recommend something specific such as this because every environment is different because of the setup. Normally I close a partition at a certain size on a particular disk so that I can use the rest of the disk for another partition and so on a so forth and when I need a new disk I can just open a new partition on a new disk. The key is to keep the open partition at a manageable size, this will help with the backup (also use Collections but this has a down side).

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the reply.

So does purging the Enterprise Vault data and write it to tape is good idea ?

You don't have to but most companies would as you would need to have off-site backup therefore backup data up to tapes and send them off site. It all depends on how your backup infrastructure is configured.

Thanks for the response mister LCT, so in this case how to safely write the Vault Store to tape if there is any way to perform it safely and how can we re-import it back again in case the use wants to recall the old email data ?

I would not recommend to take the data offline, meaning it's not available on disk anymore.

Which is how I interpret your question by reusing the disk space.

There are functions in EV to move the data to another disk/tape etc. but only for certain backup software's.

E.g. Netbackup.

There are issues when you take the data offline, e.g. if a user need to recall an old item it has to be restored back to the partition.

Which may be doable if it happens very rarely but still extra admin work.

You also have other considerations.

E.g. if you need to do an index rebuild you would have to restore everything that need to be re-indexed.

At that time will you have the diskspace to do a complete restore?

If you use a software that EV can´t interact with directly (check the compatibility guide) then the above process is completetly manual.

FreKac2, thanks for the advise

Yes I'm using EMC Avamar to do the backup of my environment.

At the moment I'm using EV 8.0 SP4 (which I haven't implement the powershell pre-backup script), I heard that in the latest edition of Symantec Enterprise Vault, we can have the option to offload the VaultStore data. cmiiw ?

I think you need to explain what you mean by "offload".

If you mean that you want to move the archived data to a secondary device/software then you've been able to do that for quite some time.

But it requires specific softwares and/or storage devices, check page 31-33 in the compatibility guide.

I haven't seen a change in this behaviour, at least not in the currently released versions of EV and again there are drawbacks by doing this.

Yes Offloading mean to migrate the data off to a tape drive for cheap storage. Because at the moment our EMC CX4-240 is running out of disk slots as well.

What could be the issue when I write to tape the data in the VaultStore disk and then delete it ?

users can't restore or retrieve the archived items is the consequent, therefore that is not a good idea. You can offload/migrate it to secondary storage. 

Hi LCT,

So in this case secondary storage is like a NAS or CIFS share that can be expanded dynamically on demand ?