Residual Files in Vault Store and Exchange mailbox increasing?

[Bill_Unger]

I just installed Enterprise Vault 8 on Friday and have been configuring/testing it all weekend.  After working through some preliminary issues, I have found a strange occurrence that I don't understand.  Note that I am doing my testing with a single mailbox and here is what I did:

Made note of Exchange mailbox size before archiving ( it was about 15MB ), and then archived all items older than 1 year.  When it was complete, I noticed that my Exchange mailbox had jumped to about 29MB and there were about 17000 new files in my vault store.  I have EV configured to create shortcuts in Outlook and I thought maybe the "safe" files were waiting to be backed up - sure enough, I noticed about 17000 files "awaiting backup."  I then manually toggled the archive bit on all files, restarted storage services, waited a while, and all files "awaiting backup" were cleared out.  Unfortunately, my mailbox had still nearly doubled.

I then decided to Restore all archived messages from the vault back to Exchange, waited a while for the completion, and then re-evaluated the results.  Now, my mailbox size is about 38MB and I have noticed all 17000+ files in the vault store are still there?!  I am not entirely certain what is going on, but at this rate, I am going to blow out my Exchange server if EV more than doubles all of the mailboxes, not to mention a ton of apparently obsolete files in the vault store.

Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

As a side note, I have the archive feature set to delete after archive completion...

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
BIll

[Bill_Unger]

 I should have added the EV is running on a Win2k8 server, using SQLServer 2008, and is interacting with a single Exchange 2003 server running on a separate Windows 2003 box.

[MichelZ]

Hi 17000 elements and 15MB? So your average mail size is less than 1k? You should try a real life example. average size >50k, with attachments and stuff. What ev does in its default config is write a shortcut with full message body, so only attachment stripped away. This saves you the space for attachments, which is usually what fills a mailbox. the shortcut then gets slightly bigger due to added properties (your mbx size increase) In real life, you probably would let shortcuts be deleted after x days/weeks/months, so your 17000 elements would only be say 5000 then. EV does nit delete items when restoring them by default. Thats ylur other size increase. Hope that helps Cheers

[Bill_Unger]

 Thanks for the reply and information!

A couple of quick follow-up questions:

1.  I am not sure why the mailbox would double in size though.  At the most, I would expect it the remain about the same size if there weren't any ( or few ) attachments...

2.  Do you know what the "standard" procedure is to clean up those obsolete archived/unarchived files?

Thanks again!
Bill