Does my Enterprise Vault Archive look 'big'?

[Rob_Wilcox1]

One of the questions which comes up is whether or not to rollover archives in Enterprise Vault. End user archives typically don't get that big, usually a few Gb. File System Archives, Public Folder archives, and Journal Archives can all become pretty massive though over time. 

So should you have one large archive, or several smaller ones?

For end user archives I wouldn't recommend splitting them, and having multiple per user. The archives are just not going to get to the large scale that might cause issues. Even if an archive has 50,000,000 items in it, and is 400 Gb in size, that's a drop in the ocean compare with FSA Archives, Public Folder Archives and Journal Archives. Having split archives for end-users can be confusing too, because they'll see them in the search interface, and archive explorer.

For some types of archive there are benefits in splitting them up.  I'll cover FSA and Public Folder archives in a future article let's, for now, focus on Journal Archives.

Splitting a Journal Archive

Journal Archives lend themselves quite well to be split at a date-based boundary. Depending on the size of the environment it might be desirable to split monthly, quarterly or yearly. I'd suggest quarterly is a 'good' compromise in terms of number of archives, versus the size of them. Splitting the journal archive like this can have a number of benefits, for example:

• Index rebuilds, conversions or repairs are usually quicker, because you can target a smaller archive
• Searches will be quicker when using tools like Discovery Accelerator
• Discovery Accelerator won't look at the index/archive if you're not looking for items in that date range
• Exports in Discovery Accelerator will be quicker

Splitting the 'archive' up like this also lends itself to manageability of all kinds..  For example if the Vault Store that the archives are in starts to reach a high number of items, then the 'next' journal archive can be created in a new or different vault store.

Do you split your journal archive up like this, or in some other way? Do you keep it as one big archive? Let me know in the comments below.

Reference