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Exchange Pending items - What restrictions are there?

BernardW
Level 3

So we are in the process of implementing EV 9.0.2 and are almost at the point of deploying it to one office - (Email Archiving only at this point after 3 months of work).

One question that my manager and I are going back and forth on is what restrictions/issues occur if we have the Pending archive icons show for our users?

I know that the pending archive icon shows up when the emails are archived but the backup of the EV Archives has not occured. Once the backup does happen the emails are removed and a shortcut is put in its place.

So are there any problems/issues that can occur if the pending icons show up all day for our users? (can we archive all day long and then just backup the EV Archives at the end of the day or is there a better way to do this?

We are a medium sized company and have archived 100GB of data so far and this weekend we will likely archive another 100+ GB of emails from people's mailboxes, with another 100+ GB to go when we archive the other offices.

Any suggestions/hints would be welcome.

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JesusWept3
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

The issues you will have is that if the users move the pending items from one location to another then the items will remain pending and never be post processed, turned in to a shortcut, unless you do a Cancel Pending or a Pending Shortcut Timeout to reset the item and then have it "re-archive"
 

If the users delete the item then you might see an error in the event log as the item can no longer be post processed and turned in to a shortcut, but i could be wrong on that as i havent tested that in a long time.

Pre Enterprise Vault 9, if you were to cancel a pending item or do a pending shortcut time out, if the item was "re-archived" you would end up with a duplicate in the indexes, however since EV9 that no longer occurs, but you may also end up with a duplicate if it gets moved from \Inbox to \folderA (one being in \inbox and one being in \folderA\)

What i would suggest is just try setting up a test mailbox and put in a bunch of items , do an archiving run, leave them in pending, move half from one folder to another, delete some of the items etc and just see how EV reacts.

That being said IF i were you and i had the chance to start from scratch, i would lean heavily towards Virtual Vault and Vault Cache and not even bother with shortcuts.

Shortcuts have their place, but they can cause a lot of issues
 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-allen-turl-07370146

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5 REPLIES 5

JesusWept3
Level 6
Partner Accredited Certified

The issues you will have is that if the users move the pending items from one location to another then the items will remain pending and never be post processed, turned in to a shortcut, unless you do a Cancel Pending or a Pending Shortcut Timeout to reset the item and then have it "re-archive"
 

If the users delete the item then you might see an error in the event log as the item can no longer be post processed and turned in to a shortcut, but i could be wrong on that as i havent tested that in a long time.

Pre Enterprise Vault 9, if you were to cancel a pending item or do a pending shortcut time out, if the item was "re-archived" you would end up with a duplicate in the indexes, however since EV9 that no longer occurs, but you may also end up with a duplicate if it gets moved from \Inbox to \folderA (one being in \inbox and one being in \folderA\)

What i would suggest is just try setting up a test mailbox and put in a bunch of items , do an archiving run, leave them in pending, move half from one folder to another, delete some of the items etc and just see how EV reacts.

That being said IF i were you and i had the chance to start from scratch, i would lean heavily towards Virtual Vault and Vault Cache and not even bother with shortcuts.

Shortcuts have their place, but they can cause a lot of issues
 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alex-allen-turl-07370146

AndrewB
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

for what it's worth, if you follow the bet practices which state archiving after hours and follow that with your backup, it's pretty easy to avoid any issues that users might cause by messing with pending items.

BernardW
Level 3

Thank you both for your answers

So to sum up - it would be best not to have the pending icons show in people's mailboxes.

 

JW2 - I would love to just have the Vault Cache (and we do have it turned on) but most of my users look at their email on a Citrix server meaning that the cache would likely end up on the exact servers that we are trying to remove emails from :(

 

Andrew8 - I agree it would be best to archive after hours followed by a backup - our backup processes needs a total overhaul to before we can schedule things correctly. And one of the parts holding up the overhaul is the amount of email in the exchange database :( so which do you fix first?

 

Sounds like the best way to do this would be to start archiving late in the afternoon and archive through the night and then early in the morning to backup just the EV and its archives. Does this sound correct?

AndrewB
Moderator
Moderator
Partner    VIP    Accredited

if you want to target information store size reduction then what you could do is set your policy to only archive items over a certain size. you could also keep the archiving window shorter in the beginning so you're getting the most bang for your buck (so to speak) while reducing the amount of data in exchange and in turn, helping your exchange backups - which afterwards helps your EV backups as you state in your case. all the while, minimizing the time that the users could be exposed to the pending items.

keep in mind that tran logs will be generated for all the database churn that EV is doing.

BernardW
Level 3

Ya I guess that would be the best method - setup the archive process to occur during a fixed window (like over the weekend for some of the first go around) and then backup the EV arvchives. that way I can keep multiple virtual processors on the EV server and not impact the network to much.

 

As to the Exchange tran logs - Ya we hit that already and had to move them to a second hard drive as the primary only has 10 GB free. Hense the reason we are working hard at pushing this out now.

 

Thank you very much for your hints and suggestions. They are greatly appreciated. I really wish I could mark 2 answers as solutions :(