Retroactivey delete FSA archived files whose placeholders have been deleted?

[charles-k]

Up until now, my FSA volume policy has been configured to NOT delete archived file when placeholder is deleted.  But now I want the archived files to be deleted.  If I change the policy to delete archived files and re-run the FSA archiving task, will it retroactively delete archived files for placeholders that were previously deleted, or will this only affect placeholders that get deleted from now on?  I'm running EV 8.0 SP3.  Thanks in advance.

Charles

[TonySterling]

Hey charles-k,
It will not retroactively delete the items for placeholders previously deleted, it will be from that point in time forward.  Couple options, you could delete them via Archive Explorer or you could recreate the placeholders via fsautility, change your policy, and then have your users delete them again.

[charles-k]

Tony,

I appreciate your response.  Here's what I'm trying to do.  A couple months ago, I did a one-time archiving of some of the folders on our file server.  We've since decided not to deploy FSA, so I need to restore all the files from EV back to those folders.  My concern is that if I run fsautility -t to restore the original files, it will restore *everything* from the archives back to the folders, including those files whose placeholders users have deleted since the archiving, as well as overwriting changed files with the original archived versions.

How can I prevent this from happening?  Is the default behavior of fsautility -t to NOT overwrite deleted or changed files when restoring files?  Would it only do so if I used fsautility -t -f to force overwrite?

Thanks,
Charles

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

I think if you run a copy from Windows Explorer from one location to another, its going to restore call a retrieve from FSA and get the latest version thats archived
then in the directory you copied them to, you should just have files and no shortcuts

If you wanted to use FSAUtility, you could use the -t and -f options, where -f only restores files where the File and the Placeholder exist.
So in other words, if the placeholder has been deleted, no file will be restore from FSA

The downside to this is, if you have an updated file, EV will replace it with what is in the Archive

[TonySterling]

Agreed with JW2, personally I would go with the fsautility option if possible.

[charles-k]

Thanks for your help guys.  What would happen if I ran fsautility -t (without -f)?  Will it restore only the files whose placeholders have been deleted, meaning files that the users don't need/want any more?

Charles

[JesusWept3]

if you run just -t and no -f, then you will restore every file in the archive for that folder, whether it exists or not