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Storage Expiry question

Ampersound
Level 3

We have an EV11 environment in place which has never had any retension policys set other than "Forever" and storage expiry was never enabled.

Two years ago all Exchange mailboxes were moved to the cloud and then as you can imagine, that stopped EV from archiving and any syncronisation stopped too.

Rolling onto today, I have been asked to enable an 8 year retension on a couple of test subject, created the policy, added the users to the test AD account linked, created the 8 year catagory. I can see the updated policys being applied to the two users in the Provisioning Task report but as their mailboxes are offpremise I imagine nothing is being applied?

I've enabled Storage Expiry and had hoped to see the index of these two test users to reflect the older items being deleted. I've checked the Event Logs on the servers where these two archives are and I have not seen any events being created to say that the items are being targetted for deletion.

Any ideas what I'm missing? Can retensions be applied to old archives that no longer access their mailboxes?

Many Thanks,

Andy

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

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Marcde
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Hi Andy, 

the following article should shed some light onto how this is handled. 

About retention categories

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/doc/122376360-125067086-0/index

excerpt from it: 

"If you assign a different retention category to a mailbox folder, or standard archive folder, Enterprise Vault only assigns the new retention category to new items that are archived from the folder or moved into it. Enterprise Vault does not change items that it has already archived..."

Based on this your modifications won't have any impact on the items already present in the archives. Did you think about modifying the categories that are already in use? 

 

Another good explanation can be found here: 

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Enterprise-Vault/Retroactively-Changing-Retention-on-archived-items/td-p/...

 

Regards

Marc

 

 

 

PMCS GmbH & Co. KG - A Serviceware Company
www.serviceware.de

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Marcde
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Hi Andy, 

the following article should shed some light onto how this is handled. 

About retention categories

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/doc/122376360-125067086-0/index

excerpt from it: 

"If you assign a different retention category to a mailbox folder, or standard archive folder, Enterprise Vault only assigns the new retention category to new items that are archived from the folder or moved into it. Enterprise Vault does not change items that it has already archived..."

Based on this your modifications won't have any impact on the items already present in the archives. Did you think about modifying the categories that are already in use? 

 

Another good explanation can be found here: 

https://vox.veritas.com/t5/Enterprise-Vault/Retroactively-Changing-Retention-on-archived-items/td-p/...

 

Regards

Marc

 

 

 

PMCS GmbH & Co. KG - A Serviceware Company
www.serviceware.de

Thanks Marc. I'll have a read of those links and have a think about what to do next.

I didnt apply it to the exisiting catagories yet as "The Business" wanted me to test on a couple of users before hitting the entire estate. If that is the only way forward, I'll have to convince them to enable it in bulk on the current retention the archives have assigned.

Kind Regards,

Andy

GertjanA
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Hello,

Marc is right, creating a new retention and assigning that to user will not revert the existing one.

You will have to change your existing one to what it needs to be. After you have changed it, you can run Storage Expiry in report mode. That will show how much will be deleted. (in EV Eventlog)

If you do not have to many archives, you could change settings on the archives. On the properties, advanced tab, you should deselect the "Delete expired items from this archive automatically". If you do this for all archives, except a few, and then change the current retention, then run expiry, it will only do the archives where you left the check enabled. If you have a lot of archives, you might be able to somehow do this in SQL, but I'm not sure how to.

Regards. Gertjan

Hi All.. an update to this question back in November.

Last week I tweaked our default retention to 15 years from Forever and have what I thought enabled Storage Expiry. Granted we have 19,000 archives so I've sat waiting to see if something happens.

4 days in and I'm not seeing any activity on the Storage Expiry reports in the Eventlog for any of the 12 EV servers.

Storage Expiry Report (Report Mode)

Vault Store Name: EXC1MBXVS
Vault Store Id: 134818A8B2C0C4A47BC471E0A2AA282591210000evault2

Number of vaults processed: 2748
Number of vaults enabled for expiry: 2748
Total number of expired items: 0

Items marked with sent\received date based retention categories have been deleted:
(none)

Items marked with archived date based retention categories have been deleted:
(none)

Start Time: 04/02/2020 07:00
End Time: 04/02/2020 07:09

I have a funny feeling something is not working properly and I'm not seeing any items being deleted on the SQL query which shows me items stored in a particular year (15 years ago).

Any advice please on how I can diagnose any issues using Dtrace? I've not used it that often.

Thanks Andy

 

Prone2Typos
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Make sure expiry is not based on archived date? Outside if that it looks good and my suspicions would be misconfiguration

GertjanA
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Hello Andy,

First a few questions. On the Site properties, tab Storage Expiry, what is expiry based on? Modified or Archived date? 

(In EV12.3) On the changed Retention Category, properties, details, at the bottom, are these 2 deselected? (prevent automatic deletion of expired items with this category, being the main interest).

On an archive for which you know it should delete something, properties, Advanced, is there a check in Allow deletion.. and Delete expired items automatically?

I am not too sure about dtrace, but you might want to trace StorageDelete as initial start. Logon EV as VSA, open commandprompt as admin, goto EV install folder, type dtrace. when started, type V, which lists what you can dtrace. Then verify you need 109. Type 'set 109 v', then type log. enter logfile location and filename. then in EV itself, perform runnow on storage expiry.

 

Regards. Gertjan

It is currently set on archived date. I'll change that and see how we get on. Thanks for the quick reply.

 

GertjanA
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Hi,

That probably explains. the item date (= modfied date) is for sure different then the archived date.

i.e. You have 100 items with a date of January 2014. You started archiving in 2016. Expiry based on Archived Date will expire these items in 2031 (15 year retention). Set to modified date will expire the items which have modified date before today -15 years.

I advise to keep an eye on SQL and Storage when you start the actual expiry. Expiry causes huge load on both. You might wwant to schedule expiry during the night/weekends.

Regards. Gertjan

Thanks GertjanA.

That makes sense now :) We do not archive any users mailboxes anymore so kicking it off now will be fine.

Kind Regards,

Andy

Proof that its working now.

Thank you all so much.

Storage Expiry Report

Vault Store Name: EXC10MBXVS
Vault Store Id: 1A55489B6D7C9A24C9E79F719FC023B501210000evault2

Number of vaults processed: 804
Number of vaults enabled for expiry: 804
Total number of expired items deleted: 1095
Total number of items that could not be deleted: 0

Items marked with sent\received date based retention categories have been deleted:
Mail Retention (15 years) : 1095 items.

Items marked with archived date based retention categories have been deleted:
(none)

Start Time: 04/02/2020 12:03