Is it possible to restore a mail shortly after retention period is over?

[MikeGGG]

Dear all,

as topic says. User is looking for a mail which was archived exactly 10 years ago. Retention period is set to 10 years so it looks like it expired few days ago. Original mail (shortcutted) is still in his mailbox, but the link is dead, and we are unable to find it in archive.

Is there any way to restore it, or it is gone forever?

Best regards

Mikhail

[GertjanA]

Hello Mikhael,

I believe it is gone forever. That is why you run Storage Expiry. It is unfortunate that a user needs an item which has just expired. You might want to check the Deleted Items tab on the users archive, but I believe that only is valid for items a user deleted.

Otherwise, I don't know how to get that item, besides restoring EVERYTHING to when it was available (SQL Databases, Storage, Indexes). I'm pretty sure you don't want to do that.

If you have Discovery Accelerator, you might want to run a search accross the archives to see if it perhaps is in another archive, or perhaps in a Journal Archive.

[Prone2Typos]

I would a) stop expiry immediately while you investigate b) check if you are getting storage expiry reports. Especially note if they are always with a lot of content. c) Check JournalDelete tables of your item DB to see if content is still there.

Storage expiry is a slow process. Deletion is a single threaded process and frequently can get backlogged. Additionally, a lot of people do not expire data the way they think they are.

If it truly is gone, perhaps your expiry reports (in the event log) can clue you in to where to see if you have backups. If it is that critical you can treat this as a deleted archive situation and recover the data from backup (maybe export based on retention and date filter?). If this is the route you go, ensure you do not accidentally write to your prod item DBs when bringing up the restored system (common catastrophic problem IMHO).

There may still be some hope if this is critical stuff.