Clearing old Journal Drives

[Paul_E]

Can anyone give me some advice please on best practise for old Journal stores please ?

We have 1 Journal Vault Store and originally had 1 Journal Partition to store a years worth of email. Over time we realised that our 250gb partition wasnt going to be big enough to hold a years worth of data so as it neared capacity we closed it and opened another 250gb partition, and then another and another etc !

As it stands we now have 7 Journal partitions on 7 different drives. My question is what to do with the old partitions which are now as far as I can tell empty. Can I just delete the drive letters and the Journal Partition pointing to it ?

My other question is, I have several of these drives that should be empty but are not. Drives which should be empty by now have .bak and .dvs files that are over a year old and I would have expected these to have disappeared by now. Is there any reason why they havent and any process I can run to clean these up before I delete them ?

Thanks for any help.

[JesusWept3]

What do you have your storage expiry set to and what is the retention set for the journal archive? Is storage expiry enabled for the site?

*.bak files are usually when an item is trying to be stored again maybe due to an incomplete operation or some such thing.

As for the other DVS files, do you have Discovery Accelerator? is it possible those items may be on legal hold?

First and foremost though, don't delete any files by hand as data that is still there is there for a reason, so under Enterprise Vault 8's new sharing scheme, you can expect items to remain in old/closed partitions if they are being shared

So for instance you may have a DVSSP in E:\Enterprise Vault Stores\Ptn1\ ..... that was archived in 2009 and then in 2010 an email is archived that has the same attachment, so it will link back to that item in Ptn1 instead of creating a new item in the current partition

So if you were to delete that item then you would find that the item now won't retrieve correctly because an item that its linking to has been deleted.

Always let enterprise vault handle the deletions.

Just as a matter of interest as well, these older partitions, what physical size are they on the NTFS now?

Maybe best running some SQL queries against the vault stores saveset table to see how many items it believes still exist in those older partitions

[Paul_E]

I've attached some grabs that might make more sense of our setup. We are running version 7.5 SP6 and are not running DA.  The older drives are 250gb in size but with only 500-600mb used space which we suspect might be either Recycler or System volume information as the dvs or bak files total a lot less than that.

[WiTSend]

One of the eaisest methods would be to recycle the now empty partitions and use them again.  When you close your next partition, open partition 1 (or if using partition rollover set partition 1 to ready).  In this manner you don't have to be concerned with "why" some items are not expired (there can be a myriad of functional reasons) and you won't continue to need more and more drive space.