EV Deleting Items from vault store

[GCP]

hi we use exchange 2003, office 2003 and EV9, we have items in users vaulted deleted items folder, that have no corresponding stub file. We have to assume that the users have been deleting stub files , without deleting the corresponding vaulted item.

My question is , how can we delete items from the vault that have no corresponding stub file in outlook

cheers

Graham

[Maverik]

User Deletion would need to be enabled via EV, but you could basically still delete items using things like Archive Explorer. 

Storage Expiry can also be used to delete old items after a determined amount of time, for example five years.

[neil_syrett]

User deletion can indeed be enabled on the Vault Site properties page under the Archive Settings tab.  You will need to perform an iisreset and synchronize all users, in order for this setting to take effect.

This will enable privileged users (based on Archive permissions) to delete items from archives, either through search or Archive Exoplorer.  But please consider the possible consequences of enabling this setting, as it will enable all users to delete items from their archives, thus overriding your carefully considered retention settings.

[Constanze]

We had the very same issue with EV8 and could not solve it via expiry or Archive Explorer or search, it is "too manually" and thus not reliable (from our point of view).
Not to forget to say: we do not use any expiry/retention which could collide with that.

Generally we switched deletion behaviour for users to "both deleted" in the desktop policy, but for older documents when deletion for users was not possible we had to look for a consulting partner to help us.
Finally we found one, solution via API programming. So this is what you might like to do as well.

Be careful with shortcuts moved outside a mailbox when cleaning up, they only work as long as the object still exists in vault.

There is no EV onboard functionality to get rid of archived items without corresponding shortcut in a user's mailbox (we had a case for this this year so this information should be valuable).

[GCP]

Thanks Neil, we already have that setup, I was looking for something a bit more 'global'

I can go in, as can any user and delete any of the contents visible from my archive explorer, but as you can imagine the numbers are horrendous.

G

[JesusWept3]

GCP,
The issue is all really focused around intent, did you really mean to delete the shortcut and its items or just the shortcut only? because EV could easily be changed to go through and check if the shortcut exists, if it doesn't exist, then kill the item in storage.

However that would be a really dangerous feature to have, because you may have storage expiry and retention set for 7 years, but to keep mailbox sizes down you have shortcut retention be 1 year, so after that time you would have to use AE to find the item

Or you could stop using shortcuts altogether and start using virtual vault, in which case EV would go in and clear the entire contents of your archive etc etc

But are you sure as well that you're not archiving the deleted items folder and its just going through archiving those items then the deleted items gets purged in outlook?

Really the policy needs to be set to Delete both and don't allow for soft deletes (shortcut deletion only) in order to stop it from occuring again.

[GCP]

JesusWept (loved the tag btw) you got to it with "because EV could easily be changed to go through and check if the shortcut exists, if it doesn't exist, then kill the item in storage."

Thats exactly what i'm after, so how easy is it ?

cheers

G

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

For the developers it would be easy, but I can almost guarantee it will never ever happen due to the whole intent of an item being deleted.

Your best bet is going to the Ideas section and finding an idea thats been submitted around this or post your own and make sure it gets as many up votes as possible, product management and supportability  engineers do read it and if enough people want it then they will take it in to consideration.

However for the reasons mentioned above, i doubt it will ever make it in to the product regardless of how many people want it, for the fact that one wrong setting by an admin could wipe out an entire infrastructure (i.e. for users who don't create shortcuts and delete the original item so they can use virtual vault)