Pending Item Status

[EVRocks]

Our environment is based on Exchange 2007 SP3, EV 10.0.3 on Windows 2008 R2 with Outlook 2010. We have a couple of archiving policies and users allowed to do manual archiving during the day and those items remains pending until the archiving run takes place on the following night.

 I am experiencing a couple of issues with regards of Pending items.

The archiving reports shows me that users have hundreds of items pending and it seems the numbers are not decreasing much. In most cases when users tries to do manual archive the pending items remains in pending icon for a few days and it seems they do not get fully archived during the archiving process overnight despite of allowing enough time for the archive task to complete and the backup jobs completed but often the Vault storage usage reporter shows high number of items waiting to be backed up. Sometimes I advised users to cancel those pending items and then archive them again.

The process that I have is like this:

Archive task runs in the evening for a number of hours – get completed

Prebackup script runs to put vault in read only mode

Backup take place for a few hours – get completed

Postbackup script runs to put vault off read only – get completed.

The second issue I have is that the number of pending items from the archiving reports does not match the number of pending items in user’s mailbox in Outlook. The items are much less in Outlook.

[GabeV]

Hi EVRocks,

What's the partition setting for backups: (1) Archive bit or (2) ignore trigger file? For archive bit, take a look at the partition and see if the archive bit is being removed, if not, you need tto check the backup SW to confirm that. If you are using trigger file, you need to check the pre and postscript to confirm if the .old is being deleted and the .txt is being created.

What software are you using for backups?

[EV_Ajay]

Hi EVRocks,

You can refer following articles which will tell you about the why item stuck in pending state , the process  and how to cancel items from pending state.

Why items may get 'stuck' in a Pending State - Basic Archive Process.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/TECH66202

How to cancel items in an "archive pending" state in Enterprise Vault (EV) for Microsoft Exchange.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH35618

Archived items (emails) remain in Archive Pending state in Enterprise Vault (EV) for Microsoft Exchange .

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH45880

Archived emails remain in Archive pending even after a full backup has been run on the Vault Store Partitions.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/TECH63337

[A_J1]

Hello EVRocks,

If Remove Safety copies is set "After Backup" under Vaultstore properites. Then Items from Outlook be in Pending and it doesn't matter if the items has been archived by the user or by the Archiving task.

Once the Backup is compelted (Post-Processing phase will start) then the orginal items which is in pending will be stripped and will ne converted into complete shortcut.

So we need to check Once you backup is completed, on the EVAdmin console, if you right click on Status and run a check, are we getting any warning about items awaiting for backup.

If Not then, I would like to whether All users are Affected, this could be with some specific items in Outllook if its not with all users.

Instead if user manually cancelling the pending items it can be done by EV by using PendingShrotcutTimeout setting. check the article http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH35618

I hope this Helps !!!

[EVRocks · Accepted solution]

Hi All,

thank you for responding.

The partition setting for backups is option (1) Archive bit. Often I do look at the partition and see if the archive bit is being removed and they have. I usually check this when I close the current partition and open a new one. I normally keep the close partition on the backup for a few days just making sure if there are any dvs files that not being backed up.

The policy for canceling pending item is set to 3 days but it looks like this policy is not working.

The Remove Safety copies is set "After Backup" under Vaultstore properties.

It appears to be the problem is only for those items that manually archived by the users otherwise the scheduled items that get archived by the daily task gets archived completely. 

Almost everyday after backup completes and the postback scrip runs when I check the Status in the EV console it shows a few hundred items waiting to be archived but I always thought these items are belong to the journaling items even though the journal items get full shortcut straight away.

I will have to go through EV_Ajay steps.

[EVRocks]

It appears to be NetBackup 7 does not clear the pending items from Mon-Fri despite of all archving phases are comepeted. The only differences in backup policy that we have for weekdays and weekends is that we use Differential Incremental backup for weekdays and FULL backup for weekends.

Weekends all pending items are cleared but it's only weekdays that we see the pending items are building up and then at weekend they are cleared.

Can someone please explain if Netbackup Differential Incremental will actually clear the archving bit on the file. I am still seeing all dvs files still have the archive attibute since Monday.

Do you recomend using the attrib command to clear these attributes will this not mess the metadata on the sql database.