Splitting user archives and journal archive

[BigAnvil]

Good afternoon!  I'm looking to your expert opinions on the following:

Single domain, single EV server and EV site.  When we had consultants initially setup our EV site, the same vault store was used for both the journal archive and the user mailbox archives.  We have 450+ users.  We run EV aware backups every 3 hours during the work day.  Although we are running EV 9.0 and things are generally vastly improved, I'm still concerned about performance for our end users.

We have not rolled out the EV Outlook add-in to most of our users because mailbox quotas are still rather low and we can't give all our users much in the way of a quota increase due to limited Exchange server storage options at the moment.  Many of our users get lots of mail and most have PSTs.  I'm going to get the add-in pushed out and get users to eliminate their PSTs.  I didn't fully realize that after items have been archived by EV, if they are deleted, the item remains in their EV archive so they can find their old deleted items anytime which is part of why I didn't push this out sooner.

Although things are better in 9.x, I'm still concerned users will have problems accessing their archived content when backups are running.  My thought is, I would like to move all the user achives to their own vault store.  We would not backup this store as often and would make it during non-business hours to minimize impact on user access.

Would moving user archives achieve this?  Can the indexes for users be separated and moved also?  Any thoughts, experiences, and opinions are welcomed.

[GertjanA]

Hello ,

Moving archives allows you to move an archive from one store to the other. The amount of users is not too mucht, but the proces can be slow and taking a long time, due to the checks being built in. It depends also on the size of the userarchives (ie how many items do they have), are there many attachments etc.

What might be an option is the other way. Move the Journal Archive. Although (from the top of my head) i am not sure this is possible, I do believe it can be done.

That way you move only 1 archive.

Additionally, you could think about the following:

Create a Journal Vault Store Group, Store and Archive.

Set up a NEW journaling task that writes to this archive.

Set the old task in report mode first, so it clears MSMQ for it. When cleared, stop and disable that task, start the new one.

When old task is cleared, you effectivly are no longer using that 'shared' setup. Depending on the size of the 'old' archive, you can decide to move it, or export it to pst, then import it in the new archive, or let it sit there. As it is no longer being written to, you will not have issues. If you use retention on the journal, and delete items from it, it will go down in size overtime, and could  be deleted when finished.

But, other options migth be there too

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

I would not create a seperate Vault Store Group, you would lose SIS.  I would create a new Vault Store for the Journal, then create a new Journal archive and point your existing journal mailbox to it.  At that point you could then move the old journal archive if you wanted or just leave it in place.

Either way, user will be able to access archived items even if their Vault Store is in backup mode so you might be over thinking your solution a little bit.  :)

[SHI-CRO]

Users can still have access to their archived items during EV backups.  Setting the vault stores and indexes in backup mode still allows recalls and searches, just not new archiving.

You can also set your mailbox policies to deleted the archived item when a user deletes the corresponding shortcut.

[BigAnvil]

First off, I'd like to say thank you again to both of you as well as to everyone else who is a regular in these forums.  Although it can be a pain to find information here, and there have been other pains associated with the support forum transition (as Symantec moved to the new format here), I can't think of anywhere else where you can post a question or request for information where you will get a faster or more knowledgeable reply than here.  You guys rock.

I was definitely only going to create a new vault store in the existing vault store group, for exactly that reason - to not lose SIS.  GertjanA - thanks for your input.  I sometime tend to think about things in a one-sided way.  I should have thought to move the journal archive... much simpler.  Thanks Tony!

[Liam_Finn1]

Hmm correct me if i'm wrong but.....

Seeing as Both Jounaling and Mailbox Archiving are both being done on the same mailboxes and items are fiurst archived to the Journal mailbox then later archived to the users mailbox archive and they are in the same Storage Group...in theory all the email in the mailboxes are in the Journal and SIS will only store one copy so by moving the journal mailbox you are essentially moveing all the email the only thing that will change is the pointers in the databases to the store.

So assuming this is correct and that moving the journal store will move everything as long as both Journaling and mailbox archiving started on the same date

In essance it would make no difference where the data was moved except database updates.

Also it would mean that moving journaling would move everything and provide no benefit

Again I may be wrong on this as we dont mailbox Journal but going from my knowledge of SIS ther is no benefit of making the move other than seeing them show up seperatly and splitting the indexes

[BigAnvil]

In my eyes, splitting up the indexes does provide a benefit.  EV requires a bit more maintenance than one would like and we do have to update and sometimes rebuild an index for journal searches.  Even if the only benefit is splitting the journal and mailbox indexes, at least when a journal index update or rebuild is being performed it will reduce the impact on users.

I then get part of my life back since I won't have to field dozen of calls from angry end users who can't search or access their own archives. 

Can anyone else verify what Scanner was saying above?

"Seeing as Both Jounaling and Mailbox Archiving are both being done on the same mailboxes and items are fiurst archived to the Journal mailbox then later archived to the users mailbox archive and they are in the same Storage Group...in theory all the email in the mailboxes are in the Journal and SIS will only store one copy so by moving the journal mailbox you are essentially moveing all the email the only thing that will change is the pointers in the databases to the store."

Thanks!

[Michael_Bilsbor]

Hi,

Yes scanner to a degree is correct but there are limits on SIS ie not worth trying to SIS on small items, so data will get written to disk not just database entries but yes you should get quite a lot of SIS.

Not sure what you are proposing around indexes.

Also when you rollout I suggest you consider using virtual vault for your users and perhaps no shortcuts in their mailbox if you are limited on their size.

Mike