Disk Space on Enterprise Vault for Exchange

[Rethink_HJ]

Hi,

We are on Enterprise Vault Ver 9.02 (exchange 2010) and I am currently processing some leavers. The way I do it is I archive everything from the leavers mailbox and export it to PST to another location and then disable archiving for that mailnox. Once the PST is backed up I delete the archive and mailbox. My question is, once the archive is deleted, does EV recover that space? Will it reflect the recovered space in Windows i.e. My Computer?

Thanks

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

That is a really tough question.
So the first immediate place you will see space savings is on the Index partitions for that user, but depending on how much was archived, it can be very minimal, for instance if they have 500MB of email archived, you may see space saving of 50-60MB etc

As for the DVS/DVSSP/DVSCC, this one is difficult due to sharing across with other users, so for instance if the user was sent a 10MB file that was also sent to other people, although that item has been deleted from the vault store, because 9 other people share it, you will not recover 10MB of space etc.

The other big one is if you use Collections to group items in to CAB files, if you do this then what happens is the items will remain on disk until such a time as the majority of the items in the CAB file are no longer needed, so you could delete a 5GB archive, and not recover any space until maybe a year down the road

I wrote about collections and sparse collections here:
http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-collections-and-sparse-collections-work

[Rob_Wilcox1]

In short the answer as JW3 says .. it depends.  Much like Microsoft's answer with regards to Exchange (prior to Exchange 2010)  JW3's is a good walk through of the possibilities.

I would also assume that you're testing the PSTs that you've generated, and backing them up at least once?

[Rethink_HJ]

thanks JW3 ...your explanation is very clear and explains why I haven't seen any real disk space being recovered...

Rob I haven't been testing the PSTs but I will start doing that now....and yes I am backing them up before deleting the archives.

Thanks again...

HJ

[Rob_Wilcox1]

You're welcome.