Work away the backlog in a controlled way

[And_Ols]

Hi.

How do I process the backlog in a controlled way?

And Ols

[Matthew_Edwards]

And Ols, could you elaborate please?

[David_Messeng1]

And,

are we talking about EV or your plumbing?

[And_Ols]

Let say I have 10000 mailboxes and 1 000 000 objects that is ready to be archived with the strategy I have set in my environment.

In our first tests we saw that a heavy load on the mailboxservers was caused during both the archiving and after the backup of the archive when the icons is going from "pending" to "arcived"

I would like to take a smaller amount of objects from every mailbox and let this process of working down the backlog be distributed over a longer time. By doing it this way I know how much that will be archived every day, I know when to do the backups and schedule it into my daily servicewindow.

Is this possible at all? Do i have to do it by enabling new users or can I do it by enabling all users for archiving and set a "number" somewhere to just pick 3 objcets from every mailbox a day? I know there is a figure to set this during "Run Now" but isn´t that figure only for the run now?

And Ols

[David_Messeng1]

And,

some things you need to know:

EV will only archive 200 items from each user on each pass (ie automatically) (ie the same as the default for Run Now). This is configurable. MaxNoOfMsgsPerPass was the registry key in v5. I guess there is a v6 equivilent (look it up). So in your scenario you could reduce it to 50 (or whatever).

If EV is pushing your Exc to hard then throttle it back by reducing its MAPI connections (default is 5) on the Service object in the console.

I'm not a big fan of saftey copies. Seem a bit pointless to me (for mailbox archiving anyways).

Hope that helps.

[Tremaine]

In V6 the default is now 1000 messages per pass. You can configure this on the archiving task's properties under 'Settings'.

But as an aside the use of Safety copies is still vitally important unless you have some kind of snapshot/replication technology that will protect your primary EV storage in the event of disk failure and dataloss.

The idea of the safety copy is to ensure that originaly item is only changed to a shortcut after a backup.

Cheers

[And_Ols]

David,

What is a pass. Is a pass every time I start an archiving or could a pass occur severel times during a scheduled timeframe?

Anders

[Tremaine]

A 'Pass' in this instance would refer to the archiving task/service actually archiving eligible items from a desiganated mailbox.

In theory you could have multiple passes of the same mailbox until all eligible items have been archived if your scheduled archiving window was large enough to go through all your mailboxes and then loop again.

The idea behind only doing a X many items in a chunk per pass is so that every enabled mailbox has something archived from it. This allows all user's mailboxes to start to be reduced on day 1 instead of just the first few, and then the next and so on.

Hope that helps
Cheers

[David_Messeng1]

Ghost,

OK an important email comes in. It's the company bonuses and it's 30Mb. The user moves it to a PST file because her mailbox is full and she uses saftey copies. The PST then gets corrupted but she doesn't notice until 3 months down the line when she comes to write the cheques.... No one gets a bonus and it's all your fault ;)

Safety Copies can be bad as well as good....

[And_Ols]

Hey, I have not asked anything about PST´s as my organisation doesn´t allow that.

So your answer in this question is that I am not able to control how many objects that can be archived per day. If I run the archiving for 5 hours every night and have set the maximum objects per pass to 50, I then have archived 500 000 objects from my 10 000 mailboxes, and that on the first pass only!!!! What if I am not able to fullfill the pass and run through all mailboxes? Will it start from mailbox 1 next time or will it start where it was when the schedule ended last time?

Anders

[David_Messeng1]

Anders,

Consider:

Right click on your Archiving Task in the Admin console. Go to properties. Look at settings and change it to 1 messages per pass. Now you will archive 10,000 emails not 50,000.

Use EVPM to disable archiving on 9,000 of your mailboxes. Now you are archiving 1,000.

Can you runduring the day? the hit isn't that hard. Sometimes archivng during the day can be better as backup and OLM can hurt the server more. You can always throttle back the services.

Remember to restart the archive run by having a 15 minute gap in your schedule if you need it.

Work out your timings and you'll be OK.

[David_Messeng1]

...and thrash the nuts off it at weekends :)

[And_Ols]

I found a SQL query to run againts the database. It will tell me how the archiving have performed the last 10 hours. Use it in the Query Analyzer against EVMailboxVaultStore

select "Archived Date" = left (convert (varchar, archiveddate,20),14),
"Hourly Rate" = count (*),
"Av Size" = sum (itemsize)/count (*)
from saveset
where archiveddate > dateadd("dd", -10, getdate ())
group by
left (convert (varchar, archiveddate,20),14)
order by
"Archived Date"
desc