What ARE safety copies....

[Capform]

Greetings,

My mandate from on high is to archive all incoming email for infinity (or until they balk at buying more storage!) 

Our current setup is as follows: Exch2003 (soon to be replaced by 2010), EV10.x and AppAssure Replay.

We have read the install guide over numerous times, but what we can't seem to understand is what does EV consider the "safety copies"?  In some sections is sounds like they are discussing the contents of the Journal mail box and at other times they sound like it is the original emails.   We want the journal mailbox empited but the original mail boxes left alone.  Does anyone have a idea how we can accomplish this?  Symantec Tech support has us set where Remove Safety Copies is Never, Archive limits are disabled,  Retention policy is set to retain items forever. Delete orginal itm after archiving is un checked. Etc.

Yet our journal mailbox continues to grow. 

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

[LCT]

Saftety Copies means that EV needs to backup EV database and vault store partitions first before the items are deleted from exchange. On your mailbox vault store you should set to After Backup, and for your journal vault store you should set the sfatey copies to immediately after archive (for journaling). This will empty out your journal mailbox immediately, if it doesn;t then there are other configuration atht is not correct. I am assuming you have separate vault stores for mailbox archiving and journal archiving?

[JesusWept3 · Accepted solution]

Safety Copies are the original email in the mailbox changed from an IPM.Note (message) in to an IPM.Note.EnterpriseVault.Pending message, Pending means that it is awaiting for Enterprise Vault to "Post Process" the item.

Post Process means that once the item has been succesfully archived, it looks at the Vault Store Partition and the archiving policy to see what to do with the item.

For Journal Mailboxes, "Post Processing" means Delete the original item.
When the item is deleted depends on how the vault store partition safety copies is set up.
"Immediately After Archiving" or "After Backup (Immediately for journaling" means that as soon as Enterprise Vault has stored the item succesfully, it will delete the item from the exchange journal mailbox and not wait for a backup to occur.

If its set to After Backup, then the items will remain in a Pending State, sitting in the journal mailbox until your backup software has gone through and removed the archive bit from the data stored in enterprise vault.


For regular Exchange Mailboxes, you can set post processing behavior through the mailbox policy
You can set to "Delete Original Item" and "Create Shortcut"

If you have "After Backup (Immediately for journaling)" set, then the following would occur:

1. Delete Original and Create Shortcut -
Items in the users mailbox that have been archived will have a "Pending Icon" next to the email, and once the backup has completed and Enterprise Vault has secured the information, the message will simply be edited, stripping attachments, adding headers and shortening the message body etc

2. Delete Original and don't Create shortcut.
The original message will go to a pending state and then wait for the backup to complete, once the backup has completed, the message will simply be deleted as it does with journaling and the user will have to use Virtual Vault or Archive Explorer or Browser Search to find that item.

3. Don't delete original and don't create shortcut:
The original message will be copied to the same folder and the copy will be placed in pending.
Once the item has been backed up, Enterprse Vault will delete the copy and the original message will remain as/is to the user.

If you do Run Now's through out the day against users in this configuration, they may end up being confused as to why they have two copies of certain email

4. Don't Delete Original and Create shortcut:
This probably shouldn't be used, you will end up with the original email and a copy that is placed in pending, and then post processing will go through and edit the item in to a shortcut.


Safety Copies set to Immediately After Archive will go ahead and perform all of those actions immediately once it has determined the item has been stored correctly, however what this means is, is that if i have received an email today at 2PM and i archive it, EV Edits the message, strips the attachment....if the EV storage goes down and we have to revert to a backup of data, that backup will not contain the email that i just archived....thus i have a small number of items that i cannot get back

[Rob_Wilcox1]

Did LCT and JW3 answer the question?

Safety copies in simple terms are just that..  a safety copy of the item.  Before it's deleted from Exchange, if Safety Copies are 'on' then a backup needs to take place on the EV server, so that the item is 'safe' (aka secure).