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Best Practice Deletion from the Archive

abachman
Level 2
I have Inherited an Entriprise storage vault setup.  Here is what I understand about it so far.  First of all the retention on everything is set so that it will not delete anything.  Consequently it has grown quite large and is now practically out of space.  I need to remove items from the vault, but am not sure exactly how to do it.  What I would like to do is create a .pst file of a persons mailbox and put it on DVD for future review if required.  We only use the enterprise vault for Exchange. 

The practice that the person used prior was when a person left the company, he simply removed them from exchange knowing he could go to EV and retrieve any message.  So, we have lots of different people over the years that have left the company whose mail is still in EV that I need to get backed up to DVD and removed from EV. 

Can anyone give me an idea for how to do this.  We are very much out of space and don't really have the room on the current server to add disk space. 
5 REPLIES 5

Judy_Glazier
Level 6
Partner
Hello

In Vault Admin Console, logged on as the Vault Service account, expand theVault Site until you can see the Archives container.

Right click on the Archives container and click on Export.  You will have the option to export to a .pst file for any of the archives.  Once you have completed the export (which is really a copy of the existing archive)  you can then safely delete the archive.

If you wish to get rid of some of the very old items in all of the archives.  You can use the storage expirey to do this for you.

In the Vault Console expand the EV Site again and go to the Policy Container, expand  the Policy container and at the very bottom you will see Retention Categories.

The default retention is Business.  If another has been created and is being used than you can go into whichever retention category is being used and change the period of time that is currently being used.  If the retention category is set to forever, nothing will ever expire.  You can change the retention period to something more realistic like five year or six years.  Be sure you have managments approval on expiring items that are older than five or six years.  Once you have change the time period for a retention category everything that has been archived with that retention category will be automatically changed to expire after the time period you have just changed.

Something to look at is if the users are allowed to delete from their archives.  This setting will be on the general properties page of the EV Site for any version of EV prior to verion 8.0.  From 8.0 and up it is still in the Properties of the Site Settings, but now under tab for Archive Settings.  The Storage Expiry tab in the properties of the Site Settings is where you schedule the Storage Expiry to run and delete any data that has exceeded the time period that exists for the Retention Category.  You have the choice to expire items based on say five years from the date it was archived, or five years from the date it was originally received in the mailbox, which is referred to as Modified Date.

Hope this information helps.

Judy Glazier

Judy_Glazier
Level 6
Partner



abachman
Level 2

Thanks for info, I think it will help a lot.  I'm going to try the export and delete you mentioned.

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
Before you delete anything you should talk with management and ask why the decision was to retain forever was made

Normally companies make this decision for a reason and if this reason is still valid maybe there is a legal reason or compliance reason why you can not delete anything or even extract it to DVD.

The company may be retaining the data for legal or compliance reasons and in some cases the legal retention is keep forever so you may need to consider expanding the storage rather than delete items.

Deletion of items from an archive may have more ramifications than just disk space, it may cost someone or even you your job so ensure you get the OK in writing from the boss before taking that step 

MichelZ
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified
Hi

Do you need any more information here?
If not, and you are satisfied with a provided answer, can you choose this as Solution, please?

Thanks & Regards
Michel

cloudficient - EV Migration, creators of EVComplete.