EV 9.0 VSG - Move archive or create another VSG ??

[EdScheef]

We save all our Exchange e-mail for 120-days on the Exchange side and recent;y started journaling all the same Exchange e-mail to an EV archive in an existing VSG that will also be retained for 120-days. Storage Expiry will handle the 120-day retention maanagement in the archive.

The 120-day Exchange journaling archive will be used to capture (via DA and Searches) e-mail items that potentially may become part of Legal Cases which might be opened later, maybe much later than 120-days from the first pre case search..... Then when and if a Legal case is actually opened, tha axctual legal Case will get its own more specific archive within the same VSG as the Exchange 120-day archive, so ....... we would then export any saved searches from the 120-day archive as PSTs, then import those PSTs into the specific Legal case archive. This would be required to facilitate searches with a full set of e-mails associated with the specific legal case.

My questions is this: When we do that export from 120-day archive then we import into specific case archive SIS will not come intio play. Instead,dwe'll have duplicate records in both archives. Without us knowing how many of these situations we might have over time:

Should we create a second VSG exclusively for the 120-day all e-mail Exchange archive, then move the 120-day archive into the new VSG, or should we  just live with the duplicate records contained  export/import processing will give us within the single VSG in the two archives ??

And then f we created a second VSG, we'd need to figure out how to maove the 120-day archive as well !!

My thoughts bounce back and forth on this so maybe you guys have some insights or experiences in this type of situation.

Thanks,

Ed Scheef

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Ed,
I've re-read the post a couple of times, where are these duplicates coming from?
The journal and the end users archive?
That would happen regardless of what vault store or what vault store group you target, the only to "eliminate" this would be to just search the journal archive or end users archive.

For compliancy, the only true compliance you can have in a company is through journaling, as it will capture Blind copy recipients, expand distribution lists etc, which won't happen on an end users mailbox, and also a user should have nothing archived that isn't in the journal archive (Except for legacy mail that existed prior to installing EV)

[EdScheef]

The "duplicates" come from the following item, excerted from the EV Admin Guide at beginning of "Migrating PST's" secition:

"When you migrate exported PST files to an archive, it is best to locate thedestination archive on a different vault store from the original archive. If these archives are on the same vault store, then you must delete the original archive before migrating the PST files. Failure to do this results in duplicate entries in the vault store database."

Thinking more about this, you are correct: there is going to be a duplicate somewhere no matter what, so this is more of a non-issue than I was really thinking... More of a potential space management issue than anything else.

As far as making the 120-day Journal archive searchable from a specific case defined to DA and its case-specific archive, that would open thr case search up to many potential un-related hits from the 120-day archive, outside of those specific folks who are deemed as "involved" in the case.

Compliance is taken care of no matter how we do it with the all e-mail archive and then of course the specific casr archive.

We do not do any mailbox archiving, only Journal archiving, otherwise all of this would be looked at a bit differently.

Thanks for the input. Good advice and good info .... it is appreciated much !!

Ed

[GertjanA]

Hi Ed,

If you only do journal-archiving, why setting retention to 120 days? Is that a legal requirement?

If you can figure out what the maximum time is a mail needs to be reproducable, you could see if that is a feasible retention period. It would definitely make your life easier.

As you know, there is a little calculation available, to estimate storage needed.

It sounds like you have your legal department say 'this might be an issue, let's export the mails to be sure'.

Is there not a risk that they export too little, and passed 120 days, items are removed from the journal-archive?

I'm not sure about exporting and importing, but I would go for either a specific archive per 'case', or having 'shared' archives.

[EdScheef]

Hi Gertjan,

To answer your question, 120-days is simply our standard retention so we can keep Exchange clean. There are no legal retention requirements for e-mail in general, unless specific persons have been identified as part of an active case, so we mirror that in EV by only having a 120-day archive for all e-mail, and then as you mentioned,we make case specific archives for active cases with longer retentions. Doing so keeps down the clutter and if you don't have it, well you don't have it.

The 120-day archive is for arbitrary searches in preparation for cases that might get opened. If pertinents are found, the search(es) is/are saved in the 120-day archive (to be exported later to case specific archive) if necessary.

Using this method we are both covered, and we keep a clean exchange DB and EV archives.

And thanks for the info, Gertjan.