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Do you set an archive size limit?

Created: 12 Dec 2012 | 3 comments
Rob.Wilcox's picture
Rob.Wilcox Trusted Advisor Partner
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Setting an archive size limit is something that has been in Enterprise Vault for many versions now, but do people use it?  In days gone by (okay only 6-ish years ago) when I supporting production Microsoft Exchange servers they ALWAYS had mailbox size limits in place.  Not specifically to 'cripple' users ability to manage their emails, but more specifically to stop a few different things:
 
* Spinning messages - with the variety of versions of Exchange and other messaging systems at the time it wasn't unheard of  to get a message spinning out of control, bloating the size of a mailbox, and if unrestricted it would eventually consume all the disk space on the drive that the information store lived on.
 
* Silly users - this is the special group of people who would send 30 Mb+ email attachments to other people... multiple times a day.  It's the special group of people who would try to send a 600 Mb PST file to their secretary.
 
* Predicting space usage - with limited maximum sizes it was easy to manage storage.
 
So with Enterprise Vault being 'my world' for the last 6 years or so, I was pleased to learn that it was possible to set archive size limits..  but it's one of those forgotten about aspects of Enterprise Vault, I think.
 
I'm a believer in setting 'some limit', even if it's large... very large even.  As with Microsoft Exchange it's not completely unheard of to have the same message archived over and over and over again, causing an archive to bloat over time.  (Not at quite the same crazy rate that would happen in Exchange, where a message would spin several times a second - in EV I've only ever seen an item be archived once per archiving run, every archiving run).
 
So, do you set an archive size limit?  And if so, what size?  If not, why not?

 

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AKL's picture
AKL Certified
Do you set an archive size limit? - Comment:12 Dec 2012 : Link

Thanks for the post Rob and for the reminder that a feature is out there which is generally not used.

We generally do not use archive size limit because:

  • We have pretty tight Exchange mailbox size limit along with retentions so we need to make sure user have a place where they can dump data for long term use.
  • We use expiry on archives than archive size limit which allows us to put tabs on amount of data on storage.
  • We use centera as our storage media and hence we leverage it's single instance storage so that if users put single item multiple times in archive, we still store only 1 copy of it and rest are just pointers.

Apart from above, other EV admins can use fingerpoint databases and SIS to make sure the data doesn't gets bloated right? (Thinking out loud)

Thanks again for the post. I learn a lot through your blogs.

P.S. Please ignore if the question "why yes or why no" wasn't actually a question but an expression, I might have understood it incorrectly.

Thank You

AKL

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Rob.Wilcox's picture
Rob.Wilcox Trusted Advisor Partner
Do you set an archive size limit? - Comment:13 Dec 2012 : Link

Thanks for the thoughts and comments AKL - very useful.

Many Thanks,

Rob

www.quadrotech-it.com - All your EV Tools

PS I hope that the post proves helpful.

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huan.zhou's picture
huan.zhou Partner Accredited
Do you set an archive size limit? - Comment:21 Dec 2012 : Link

If we enable journal archiving, since all the emails already archived, rely on the SIS, user mailbox archives size should not be a big issue.

thanks. 

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