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Will I gain disk space by implementing Storage Expiry ?

Updated: 21 May 2010 | 10 comments
Leonardo Fernandez 2's picture
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I began archiving my users' mailboxes in 2006. Their mailboxes contained email going back to 1998!! A retention policy was never implemented. I now need to configure the default retention policy to 7 years and run storage expiry. Will doing this free up disk space on my storage drives? If so, how does this work? Does EV run a sort of defrag on its cab files and closed partitions in the way Exchange defrags its stores during maintenance?

 

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Scanner001's picture
09
Feb
2010
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Will it recover disk space

Will it recover disk space YES

EV deletes the expired content and any related indexes to free up disk space

You mentioned that you have data going back to 1998. I would not expire the data on one go because the amount of items to be deleted could overwhelm the servers and cause errors when expiring the data

My recommendation is take one or two years at a time and slowly expire the data from your system.

First expire data older than 2000 so thats 10 years old. once that completes then change the policy to expire items older than 8 years old and so on until you reach your goal

You may get errors saying that it could not process all items in a vault. This could indicate that your servers were overwhelmed and you may need to rerun that same retention policy again. 

I say this because I did such a process in the past and anything over 3 or 4 million items to expire could cause issues so take it slow and break it up

JesusWept2's picture
09
Feb
2010
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EV with Collections and

EV with Collections and expiry is a tricky subject
will you see space savings from expiry? not right away you won't

there are many factors, such as how many people are sharing that item

i.e if you have an email that is shared between 10 people and you run expiry and it deleted 9 out of those 10, the items will still remain
and when an items in a cab file, the items will remain in the cab file and the entries out of the database will be deleted
only when Sparse collections run will you then see space decrease.

I wrote the following article about it here, sorry if its long winded or confusing

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/how-collections-and-sparse-collections-work

GertjanA's picture
09
Feb
2010
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but...

Leonardo writes: " began archiving my users' mailboxes in 2006 "

Does expiry not run based on 'archived/modified' date? Does this not imply that items will not start expiring in 2013? (taking in account the 7 years retention)? Because the items are archived as of 2006.

Or am I loosing it and becoming the blond my wife says I am ;-))

GJ

Thank you, Gertjan
MCSE, MCITP (2x), MCTS, SCS7.5/8.0/9.0, STS9/10
Company: www.t2.nl
The EV-Dashboard. Get it here: http://evdashboard.so

Scanner001's picture
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Feb
2010
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If my archive date then you

If by archive date then you are correct but if they did a historic load which it sounds like they did then if they expire by modified date then items would start to expire on the next expiry run

JesusWept2's picture
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Feb
2010
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Lets take an example of an

Lets take an example of an email sent on january 1st 2000 and archived january 1st 2005

Expiry based on Archived Date is when the item was archived
With a 10 year retention period, the item would expire in 2015

Expiry based on Modified Date is Sent Date for email or Modified Date for Files under FSA
With a 10 year retention period, the item would expire immediately on the next run

Scanner001's picture
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2010
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Hmm I thought i just said

Hmm I thought i just said that :P :)

JesusWept2's picture
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2010
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you waffled and i made

you waffled and i made pancakes :)

Scanner001's picture
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2010
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hahahah Just make sure you

hahahah Just make sure you don't burn them hahahaha 

GertjanA's picture
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Feb
2010
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Waffle

I'll have one too...

Thank you, Gertjan
MCSE, MCITP (2x), MCTS, SCS7.5/8.0/9.0, STS9/10
Company: www.t2.nl
The EV-Dashboard. Get it here: http://evdashboard.so

Leonardo Fernandez 2's picture
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Feb
2010
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Thank you to everyone for all

Thank you to everyone for all the great info.