EV - Last accessed vs Last modified

[TheRock]

Hello all,

Can anyone help me with this.  We are about to implement EV in our business the policy drawn up is that all files that have not been modified for one year are archieved and stored on a secondary SAN.  I have now been asked the benefits of archiving files last modified over last accessed, so far i can only think that by doing it as last accessed i would not archive as much data which is not what we are looking for we want to save space on our servers.  
Can anyone else help with a further explanation? i am a project manager rather than a technical specialist so please be kind :)

Many Thanks

Alan

[Wayne_Humphrey · Accepted solution]

Hi The Rock

Welcome to our world of Enterprise Vault ;)

If you are referring to mailbox archiving
You cannot archive data based on last accessed time.  You can only archive email based on the following:

• Age of an email
• % of users Exchange Quota

If you are referring to File System Archiving
You can then Archive based on the following:

• Last archive time- This option enables you to ensure that shortcuts are not created for frequently-modified files.
• Last access time - This option enables you to ensure that shortcuts are not created for frequently-accessed files.
• Last modified time- This option enables  you to ensure that shortcuts are not created for frequently-modfied files.
• Created time - Specified time has elapsed since the file was created.

Note:
If you specify more than one of the time conditions, Enterprise Vault does not create shortcuts until all the conditions are satisfied.

[BravoZulu]

Hi Alan,

Peronally I would say modified date.   But, it would depend alot on the type of working environment you're in?  For example, are you an insurance company, with users that have alot of old policy documents that they view on a daily basis?  If so, setting the Last accessed option would not archive those documents over 1 year old, and that could be literally thousands.   Have you run the FSA reporting tool in your enviroment?  It gives reports about the type of files you have and their age etc...

Thanks,
BZ

[TheRock]

Hi There

Thank you for your comments.  I am refering to the File System Archiving.  The business is a Local Authority and is quite large in terms of data storage. 
At the moment our pilot is just to archieve data on last modified, everything that is over one year old is archieved and if it is modified then stored back into it's primary location, this in my opinion is the best way forward as it means that although there might be a lot of data moving backwards and forewards it does mean that more data is archived in the long run, i suppose the only real way would be to test it...
I am not too sure if the FSA tool has been run, our IT is contracted out to a third party company i'd have to check with them.
Thanks for your help everyone.

Cheers
Al

[BravoZulu]

Hi Al,

The utility's official name is the File System Analyzer.  It runs against your environment and reports on files type, size and date.   It helps when you need to make design decisions like this based on factual data from your environment (a bit like exchange store reporter for your mail). 

BZ

[TheRock]

Thanks for you help everyone.

Regards

Alan

[Pierre_Viens]

Hi all!
I found something strange about this utility and want to know if anyone else noticed it. I am using version 1.10 of File System Analyzer. One of my customers reported me that FSA ignored the first folder of every volume he ran the analyzer against. I ran some test on my side and came to the same conclusion. Did any of you notice that?

Thanks
Pierre