Enterprise Vault Exchange 2007 Journaling

[Bilgore]

Hi-

I have what is probably a dumb question, but I have not been able to find an answer in the EV documentation (version 8.0.) 

I have a client who is doing both user mailbox and journal archiving from Exchange 2007.  This client has a total of 4 retention folders set up for users:  1 year, 3 years, 5 years, forever. 

Is there a backend process (or some other process) which "links" or "ties" items archived from a user mailbox with items archived from the journal mailbox?  So for example, when an item is archived into a mailbox archive and a journal archive, one year passes--the expiry process runs and deletes the message from the mailbox 1 year retention folder....does the same deletion occur to the copy of the message that was captured in the journal mailbox archive?

Or, does the journal mailbox archive have a completely separate retention policy that has no interaction with or relation to the policy applied to user mailbox archves?

Any insight will be GREATLY appreciated!

Thank you.

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Your Journal Mailbox will be a seperate archive that can have its own retention
Each user will have their own mailbox and have any retention you choose to give them as well

But from a metadata standpoint, EV treats an email that has been journaled and an email that has been archived in a users mailbox seperately. so if a user archives an email they received there will be two database entries (one for journal, one for the mailbox), the items will be indexed in the users mailbox and in the journal archive and files will be written.

When expiry comes along, say the user was set for a 1 year retention, expiry will delete that item, and remove the database entries and index entries , but the item in the journal will remain for however long you set the expiry up for.

It gets a little complicated with the OSIS sharing mechanism
So for instance say the user has a 5MB file, its in the mailbox and its in the journal.
The journal archives the item first, and you end up with say a 2MB file on disk (after compression)
The user then goes ahead and archives their item, EV then goes ahead and looks and see's that the item already exists, so it creates a small file that and a database entry, that points back to the 2MB file already stored.

Then after 1 year the users item expires, however the 2MB file will still remain on disk, because its being shared by the Journal user, and the journal user isn't done with it yet.

So things to watch out for are things like "hey we just expired 1TB worth of data!" however, you may not see 1TB or even close to that being reclaimed from disk, because journaling probably has all that data shared out anyway.

And lastly, if you wanted custom retentions in the journal based on senders, recipients, or contents
(i.e. MOM messages get set to 10 days, messages that have XLS files get retained for 7 years, and messages with ZIP files for 1 year etc) you would have to use DCS (Data Collection Services)

[GertjanA]

Well explained JW.

To add. What JW writes on the OSIS model is valid, provided that sharing is configured to share everything between the Journal and Mailbox archives.

If you have configured a seperate VSG/VS, (Vault Store Group/Vault Store), seperated out legal and mailarchiving, and share everything only in VSG or VS, then expiry will be seperated too.

The disadvantage is that the above mentioned 5MB file now gets stored twice, once in the Journal archive, and once in the users archive.

That in itself would not be a bad thing, but the above is a scenario I see in the EU.