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 Once you have change the time period for a retention category everything that has been archived with that retention category will be automatically changed to expire after the time period you have just changed.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