EV 8.0 SP2 - my mailbox was getting archived, but not any more!

[rasobey]

EDIT: RESOLVED. Having spoken to our EV support consultants, this has been resolved by the deletion of the "hidden" message in my mailbox. I think EV had got confused somewhere between me moving my mailbox, deleting the archive, adding myself to a new provisioning group, etc etc. A happy ending before the weekend.

 
All,

I am playing with a brand new installation of EV 8.0 SP2 running on Windows server 2008 SP2 x64 edition.

When my mailbox was first added to the provisioning group, EV went away and played quite happily. The next morning I saw lots of lovely "archived" symbols in Outlook. Anyway, being the curious person I am, I tested a few things out:

1) Restoration of archived items directly to the mailbox.
2) Creating a new policy with different archive rules and adding myself to that policy (using provisioning groups etc).

Now, the problem I am facing is that after restoring my items, nothing in my mailbox is being archived. And I mean nothing unless I add it to the vault manually. I have read elsewhere in this forum that EV will only archive based on modified date, I understand that. My concern is that there are plenty of items in the mailbox that have a modified date of July/August where the policy says "Archive older than 1 month".

Apart from that small issue (!) what is the correct procedure for "resetting" an archive enabled mailbox? I can't help thinking that my mailbox has somehow got itself into a broken state, and I need to reset everything back to how it was before we even installed the servers. The best I can do is disable my mailbox for archiving, remove myself from the provisioning group, then delete the archive completely from the server. There must be a better way!

Anyway, I'll save the rest of my questions for a different thread.

Cheers

Richard

[TonySterling]

First thing you would want to check is what provisioning group you are in and if that group is set to be archived.

You do NOT have to delete your archive.  If you want you could set the IgnoreEVDates registry key to archive the items you have previously restored.

To allow Enterprise Vault to archive the restored items during the next archiving run, create  the REG_DWORD IgnoreEVDates in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\KVS\Enterprise Vault\AgentS.  Set the value of IgnoreEVDates to 3 (decimal), then restart the archiving task.


To see what policy is being assigned you your mailbox you can do the following:
1. Expand "Targets" in the Vault Administration Console.

2. Right-click on "Exchange" and select "Display Policies Assigned to Mailboxes". (Figure 1)

Figure 1
 

3. Type in the user's last name and click on Find at the bottom of the page.

[PJuster]

Have you tried right clicking your archiving task and choosing "run now" and selecting report mode, this will generate a report in program files(x86)\enteprisevault\report, this report can be opened in Excel for easier reading.

This technote will help you understand the report
http://support.veritas.com/docs/273162   Understanding the Archiving Task report

[MichelZ]

As this is a 64-bit System, the registry key would actually be

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents

Cheers
Michel

[TonySterling]

Thanks mate!  I copied and pasted that and forgot to correct it.

Cheers,

[MichelZ]

You're welcome.
Got my PIE full now... :D

[TonySterling]

I saw that, I posted a shout out in the TA group board.  :)

Cheers,

[Liam_Finn1]

Michel,

You better watch your weight after all that PIE :)

[rasobey]

 Thanks for the reply, Tony. Confirmed that my provisioning group is archiving - mailboxes added to it only today have been archived successfully - and the correct policy is applied to my mailbox. I'll make the reg key changes (and the change for wow64!) and let you know what happens.

Edit: 2 mailboxes that were supposed to be provisioned weren't; adding the reg key for for the ignoredate and restarting the task didn't allow my mailbox to archive anything new. Next? :) :)

[rasobey]

 I tried that once, wasn't really sure what the report meant, only that it said 0 for items ready for archiving (I think). I'll run it again tomorrow.

Cheers for the link Paul.

[Rob_Wilcox1]

So you archived a load of stuff, and restored it all back to the mailbox, changed policies around, and now that stuff you restored isn't archiving?

It's because when we restore items we added a restored date attribute.  It won't become eligible for archiving until the number of days from your policy passes based on the restored date.

You can override this...

Create a REG_DWORD called IgnoreEVDates in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents or  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\KVS\Enterprise Vault\Agents depending on if it is 32/64bit.

Set the value of IgnoreEVDates to 3 (decimal), then restart the archiving task.

This should allow you to re-archive the emails immediately.

The values for this key are as follows:

0 = Off
1 = Ignore Archived date
2 = Ignore Restored date
3 = Ignore both

[rasobey]

 Thanks for the reply Rob. That suggestion was posted early on this thread by Mr Sterling, and something I tried without success.
I've run the archiving task in Report mode which say I have 0 items ready to archive, but over 18000 "archivable items". What's interesting to me is that a lot of items in my mailbox have a modified date of a least 2 or 3 months ago. The policy is set to archive on 1 month or older.

Am I making sense or am I not understand the point of modified dates?



Cheers

Richard      

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

I would recommend zapping and re-enabling.  You will be able to point your mailbox back to your archive.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/273154

How to remove Enterprise Vault (EV) properties from vault enabled mailboxes

---

Details:

In order to remove EV properties from vault enabled mailboxes, modify the script below to match the particular DirectoryComputerName, SiteName and Mailbox DistinguishedName. Edit the file in Notepad and save in UNICODE format, with an .ini extension.  

[Directory]
DirectoryComputerName = Vaultserverthathostsdirectoryservice
Sitename = sitenamefromadminconsole

[Mailbox]
DistinguishedName = /o=organization/ou=mailboxou/cn=Recipients/cn=mailboxcname

[Folder]
Name = Mailboxroot
Zap = True
 

Run Enterprise Vault Policy Manager (EVPM) from \Program Files\Enterprise Vault on the EV server logged on as the Vault Service Account (VSA). The syntax for EVPM follows:

EVPM [-?] [-e Exchange Server computer name ] [-m service mailbox] [-f Initialization file location and name]

 

Parameter	Meaning
-?	Prints usage to screen
-e	The Exchange Server computer name
-f	The initialization file location and name
-m	The name of the Enterprise Vault service mailbox

Note:

* If EVPM is run without any parameters, it prompts for each one.

* The mailbox that has been zapped will need to be enabled again as it will show up as "New" when running the Enable Mailbox wizard.

* Zapping a mailbox removes all customized archiving settings from the root of the mailbox and any folders within the mailbox; if EVPM has been used to apply customized archiving settings for different folders in user mailboxes, those settings will need to be re-applied via EVPM again after zapping the mailbox using the above

[symsks]

I've did both the registry edit to ignore the dates/etc and also tried zapping the mailbox. 

My mailbox in question had been archived at one point then I exported all items to a PST to reimport to the mailbox and deleted everything in the vault (during the export process).

Now none of those exported items are archiving. 

[Rob_Wilcox1]

@symsks

Are you 100% sure that the registry key is in place, and in the right place, and that you restarted the archiving task?  Did you do a run-now against your mailbox after that, and have you got the dtrace of that?

[symsks]

update: deleting the hidden message as noted by the OP resolved the issue.