Effect of very large number of shortcut characters

[Cb2003]

Hi

Could someone please explain what the effect of configuring a very high number of shortcut characters would be in terms of space usage on Exchange and EV?

If I have a shortcut character number of 10,000, EV would still go through the archiving process for each message and change the item to shortcut, but what would be in the contents of the savesets of those email with less than 10,000 characters?  Would they be almost empty, but still occupy the miminum cluster size on disk?

[Patti_Rodgers · Accepted solution]

The savesets are where EV stores the data, and that space utilization will not be impacted by shortcut strategy at all. When EV archives an item, it copies it from Exchange, converts to a saveset, and stores it on the vault store (SAN storage presented to the EV server perhaps, or NAS, or a Centera device, whatever).  This process will be the same regardless of the shortcut contents or even if you are not leaving shortcuts behind.

The shortcuts themselves, which are stored in Exchange, are what you will see vary in size. A 10,000-character shortcut is going to be much bigger in Exchange than a 100-character shortcut.  If your policy is set to include 10,000 characters in the shortcut and the email in question has only 100 characters, it will take up less space than the one that truly has 10,000 characters--- EV won't pad the shortcut that has less body just to make it take up exactly 10,000.

[Andrew_G_]

Just to add that if you configure the shortcuts to have the banners and links, then a simple 100 character email may actually increase in size when converted to a shortcut.

As Patti said though, shortcut settings have no impact on EV storage, only what's left in Exchange.

[JesusWept3]

One note of caution though, there is an issue when you try and keep too much text, it can cause ArchiveTask.exe to choke and consume 99% CPU and stop processing anything. If the characters are that important, you're best off saying to keep the whole body and trust that stripping the attachments would be good enough

[Cb2003]

Thanks for the replies.

I should have explained myself better.  I am trying to determine how much space would be wasted by enabling such I high number of characters, but not ticking the 'only archive messages with attachments box'.

Say I have 1,000 messages in my mailbox of varying sizes, but only one has an attachment.  By 'archiving' ALL messages, how much space am I consuming on my NTFS vault store partition for what is effectively empty savesets?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Well, it depends what you're using EV for, are you using it for mailbox management purposes, or are you using it for legal reasons? For the most part, the average mail size is 32k, so the chances of you wasting space with a 4k message is not all that big.

It wouldn't make much sense to be honest just to be archiving only messages with attachments, because if that is the case, then EV is probably the wrong product to be using