Best practice for archiving of small files with Enterprise Vault

[babsy2000]

Our site is curently producing a high volume of small files, which are slowing up the Archive process.  I was just wondering what other users are doing with regards small files and archiving?  One suggestion has been to zip up the files prior to archive but this would be a manual process and an additional resource overhead.  Is there anyway to automate this zipping or what would people suggest?

B.

[JesusWept3]

It really depends on what those files are, would zipping them up cause issues for other applications that may depend on them? And also do you use FSA for purely file management and space reclamation or do you have any legal requirements to search the items, as zipping them may impede on legal searches But really you could just set something up on a windows scheduler to go through and zip the items up but i would think the process of finding and zipping all the small items would take as long as FSA does

[babsy2000]

The files are mostly jpegs, gifs or small files like this, no other application depends on them.  FSA is primarily used for space reclamation but there is a need to be able to restore these files when required.

I suppose I was wondering what is best practice for handling the archiving of small files, i can see warnings on documentation about how they can slow down a system but nothing on best practice?

[durtynacho]

What we do to speed up archiving is use a trigger file, that way EV only has to check the root of the directory to see when it last backed up the data in it as opposed to checking every single file for the archive bit. This really helps.

[JesusWept3]

nacho, are you talking about the vault store partitions (DVS/DVSSP/DVSCC/CAB) etc  or are you talking about a file share targeted by FSA?