ev archiving priority

[EVMan]

Hi

We have around 1500 leavers - of which EV has successfully provisioned and enabled their mailboxes for archiving.

The policy is set to archive all items and delete the shortcuts in the mailbox - so everything goes to their respective vaults.

This is fine but there is no real way of telling the progress EV is making on archiving these users (we don't have sql reporting)?

If we run archiving tasks in report mode the same item count shows up against some users, but for other users EV is doing its thing and removing all shortcuts as the item count is 0 - and when we go into the mailbox there are 0 items which is great.

Our archiving schedule is set to run in the evenings from 6pm - 8am next day and weekends.

But if we run an 'archive now' in the working day on certain mailboxes we know that ev hasn't really touched it doesn't seem to make a difference?

Does archive run now process regardless of the time window and will it archive all mails according to the policy for that mailbox?

We are struggling to see that EV is doing its thing for these leavers and without going into each exchange mailbox and checking, or running individual reports on mailboxes how can we tell its completed successfully?! Are there any reports to run that check mailboxes with <50 items in the mailbox for example?

The archiving tasks in question are only associated with these 1500 leavers (exchange 2003 archiving) as everyone else is happy and running on exchange 2010 with exchange 2010 mailbox archiving tasks.

Any help would be much appreciated.

thanks

[MarkBarefoot]

What is your policy with regard to message class and also folders, like Sent Items, Deleted etc etc....

[R_Meeker]

The best way I would suggest is going to be running the archive run now report mode. If those same users have exactly teh same figures every day after the archive window, then you aren't archiving from those mailbox.

If you have the same number in the 'no of items ready for archive' column of you report run then the correct policy is being applied. If the 'no of items ready for archive' is 0 then you aren't in the correct policy and you need to look at your policies.

Vault store reporting from the VAC should give you a report per archive.

If you seriously want to enable reporting here is a TN that may make the decision for you

http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO31826

Apart from that there are some SQL queries that can be run, to show # of items archived per archive, but it's quite labour intensive on SQL and really it's just pulling the infomation you get when you run reporting.

You say you archive all night long, when do you run backups?

Archiving does and doesn't happen outside the archiving window. We won't pick new items out of exchange outside the window, we will process archived items that are already in the storage archive processes, from the previous archive window run.

All in all, if the archive report shows the same 'no of item ready to archive' every day for those archives you need to find out why, best bet is to run a manual archive run with a Dtrace on Archivetask and watch it pick up the mailbox and process it. If it doesn't show anything, best open a support call.

[MarkBarefoot · Accepted solution]

An easier way would be to call Support and ask for a copy of the Exchange Mailbox Analyser. This can be used to trawl through one of the mailboxes in question and then produce a report of exactly what you have in each folder.

If you aren't targetting someting right then it won't archive, simple as that.