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Enterprise Vault Help Needed

Budman007
Level 3
I am very new to the Enterprise realm, so I might have some sill questions. Here is the problem. Have Enterprise vault that the services keep stopping because the drive its on is full. (under 6GB vault services stop) So my task is to clean up the vault. It appears the vault size currently is around 550GB. Looking at the mailboxes, it don't seem possible. So I have seen some Exchange Journals that are really large in size, However, there isnt a way to export them that I can find like a mailbox. Any ideas? Next, there are some mailboxes that I can see that I want to export then remove, BUT the services stop before I can accomplish this, thus the export fails. How can I keep the services on long enough for an export? I also believe there is a TON of archiving waiting to be done, as the other day I cleaned up some and had almost 10gb free, then it just filled right back up so far, that now its stuck here, where I can't do anything. I found a way to turn off the monitoring so the services might run for awhile, BUT if I do that and it totally fills the drive, I am up the creek. If I can remove some of the journals(110GB and 70GB in size) this will help a lot. If I do remove or move them, how can I get them back incase I ever need to? Thank!!
17 REPLIES 17

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 My first question is it possable to expand the disk to make more room even if it is a temp solution to allow you to get the services working so you can do some data cleanup?

Budman007
Level 3
Nope, no way to expand the disk size.....thanks though.

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
How about putting the tasks into  manual mode then stop them

This will stop any archiving happening on the system

Second do a temp move of some of the data off the EV server to allow the services to start

Then cleanup the data

Once it is cleaned then move the temp moved data back to the ev server and start your services


Seeing as you cant expand space you need to look at changing your retention policies to delete data sooner if the business allows because it sounds like you are adding data faster than you expire it 

Budman007
Level 3
Wow, I am lost...haha...First, how/where do I put the tasks into manual mode? Next, when you say a "temp move" of some data, are you meaning mailboxes and such? The only actual data on the drive itself is sql and moving it isn't REALLY simple....and then I would ask, where do I change the retention policies at? The main problem is, the services are active for about 15-20 seconds before they all drop, so I dont have time to look at anything or do much at all before I get errors.

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 oh wait so you are telling me that this is the SQL server for your Enterprise Vault Environment?

Is it SQL only or is it EV and SQL

Budman007
Level 3
I know its EV for sure, now it has MySql on here, but I am not sure if it has anything to do with EV or not.  Does that help? What is the Exchange Journals in EV and can they be moved or exported?

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 ok sounds like you have a combination of SQL and EV on the one server


OK open the Enterprise Vault Admin Console and expand the servers tree to see your server
expand on the server and click on tasks

In here you can see the Enterprise vault Tasks that do the archiving.

click on a task and select properties, then set th task to manual and hit OK
Once thats done on each task then you can stop them if not already stopped

If i were you my next step would be to see if i can regain any space by compressing the SQL databases

WARNING. BACKUP THE DATABASES BEFORE DOING THIS

To do this open SQL server management sudio
Expand databases
Right click on each database, select tasks, select shrink then database
repeat but this time select files

do this for each of the databases. Most databases contain alot of white space this will help shrink the database to the size of the actual space used

Once thats done see what space you have left

Next try starting the EV services to see if they come up and stay up

If yes then you may be able to get the cleanup done before starting the tasks again

You still need to look at either adding disk space or changing your retention to decrease the amount of data stored. If not you will be back in the same trouble you are in now

Also set a regular maintenance job in SQL to compress the databases weekly







Budman007
Level 3
Ok, I will give this a try...while I am working on this...Can you explain what you know about the Exchange Journals and what can be done with them as well to free up space? Thanks again.

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
 Exchange Journals is basically every email sent or received to a user who's mail store is being journaled has a copy of the sent or received email sent to a journal mailbox.

In EV you have a Journaling task. This task looks to the Journal mailbox, downloads the emails from the Journal Mailbox and then loads them into the archive


The only way to free up space on journaled mailboxes is to expire the data

Journaling is turned on because a company need to track all outgoing and all incoming emails for either compliance or legal reasons. Unless you have lots of storage you need to expire the data from a journal store regularly unless you have some legal or compliance reason to retain forever.

This you need to discuss with management to make a decision on how long you actually need to keep this data.

Budman007
Level 3
Well that may change Now, our company was just purchased by a private company, so no more uhhhhhhhhh red tape for SOX...can you tell me how where to check and see what the settings are for the journaled mailboxes to expire?

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
You can find this in the Enterprise Vault Console
Expand Policies, then click on Retention Categories

Pick out the journaling retention category from the list on the right and select properties of that item

You may be using a custom one or one of the default categories but normally most create a new specific category for the company and name it journal or something like that In there you can see the day or years it is set to. If the tick box for keep forever is enabled then nothing every gets deleted from the archives

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
Any update on this? 

Budman007
Level 3
Yup, just messaged you...but basically, got a journal mailbox exported to pst(3days, 70gb worth), then deleted the mailbox and the exchange journal entry, but the drive space hasn't changed.....what else do I need to do?

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
Why did you delete the journal mailbox?

The space on your EV server has nothing to do with your journal mailbox

Whats happening now is that all your exchange servers which were journaling to your journal mailbox are building a queue of email to be sent to your journal mailbox. or if you turned of journaling on them you are no longer compliant with the companies needs to capture all the emails send and received



You were to talk to your management to either get more storage or set a lower expiry date on the data in the archive.

By setting the lower expiry date and running expiry you would have deleted old data and made space for new data. Or by adding new disk you would have the ability to clear your journal backlog and gotten the system under control

If you did what i think you did... and i pray you did not. My recommendation is get the help of EV support to get everything back in place, get EV training ASAP or bring in external EV engineering to help you fix the issue.

I can talk you through it on here but it will take forever. I thought I explaind it well enough.

Are you in the USA? I will send you a Private Message please read it now



Budman007
Level 3
So your saying, anytime you remove any mailboxes from the vault that it won't free up any disk space? The company WILL NOT spend a dime on upgrading or getting consultants at this point and the journal I removed was out that hadn't been touched since 2006. Plus, it was pushed out to .psts so anything removed or deleted can be restored.

Liam_Finn1
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified
removing the mailbox is not what frees up space, expiring data from the archive frees up space

When you export data from an archive as a backup and then exiire the data in the archive, the contents of the database are removed and also the indexes, so will the actual files that were archived but you need to follow a process to do this.

You did a backup of the archive...well thats what it sounds like you did
Identify the index locations for the journal in the VAC
Next in the VAC you need to delete the archive

When this is complete any enteries in SQL and also the storage it used should be erased also

You may need to delete the directories for the archived data and indexes. The SQL database for this archive will also need to be deleted

MichelZ
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified
Hi there

Do you need more info on this subject?
If not, could you mark a Post that suits as a Solution?

Thanks & Cheers
Michel

cloudficient - EV Migration, creators of EVComplete.