Recently I assisted a customer where they wanted to archive content on a CIFS-enabled NAS device which does not currently support FSA Placeholders.  In our testing, Enterprise Vault was successfully able to archive content from their NAS device and leave behind Internet shortcuts (.url) for archived files. 

The customer will be migrating to NetApp in the future and wanted the ability to migrate archived content from their current NAS device to NetApp.  One of the requirements for this test was to create Placeholders (instead of Internet shortcuts) for their archived files on the NetApp device.  Using FSAUtility.exe with the -pm and -c options, we were able to easily show how Enterprise Vault can assist with migrating archived content between these two hardware platforms and create Placeholders. 

The procedure for this has been documented in the "Migrating and Consolidating File Servers with Enterprise Vault" whitepaper in Appendix B...

Fresh off the presses is the 200Mb+ Enterprise Vault 9.0.4 Cumulative Hotfix 3.  It's available from the following link:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH201960

Enterprise Vault cumulative hotfix 3 fixes the following issues:

Enterprise Vault server
Etrack 2902717: FSAUtility -pm command with NetApp server as destination could fail with unhelpful "Index out of range" error
Etrack 2925604: EVSVR failed to repair issue with irretrievable items when a saveset file was collected from more than one location
Etrack 3029045: File System Archiving from Celerra/VNX failed to create placeholders on first archiving run
Etrack 3054643: Event 3412 from mailbox archiving task after running EVDominoExchangeMigration.exe
Etrack 3055170: EVDuplicateCleaner now available for Enterprise Vault 9.0.4 Domino Server...

Enterprise Vault File System Archiving has over the last few years had many improvements made to it to really just the 'Enterprise' title. One of the best of these is a checkpoint mechanism. In this post I'll explain a little about how it works and how it can really help.

If you have a large file server with 10,000's of folders, and millions of files, it really doesn't matter how big you make the archiving window it is unlikely that the archiving task will manage to get through evaluating every single file. Prior to the introduction of the checkpoint mechanism this was a big problem for Enterprise Vault administrators. What would happen is that each time the archiving task started it would scan through folders and files and start archiving and processing them.. but it would never get to some folders.

People tried...

A question which appeared on the forums the other day was worthy, I think, of further investigation.  It's one of those questions that you think should be 'obvious' or 'easy' but of course it's not that straight forward.

The question is:

When using FSAUTILITY to bulk recall files how can progress be tracked?

We know that when the FSA Archiving Task is running the report file that it generates usually reports 0 Kb for quite some time, but when you open it, it does contain data… so you can see 'progress' that way.

People who have used Enterprise Vault for some time know that there are lots of differences between the way that FSA and Exchange Mailbox archiving operate.  Fundamentally FSA does not use...