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Archiving and eDiscovery Community Blog

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Adobe Acrobat Protected Mode and Enterprise Vault FSA
Rob.Wilcox | 17 Mar 2013 | 0 comments

 

With Adobe Acrobat version 10 came a new feature called Protected Mode.  It was aimed to improve the security of handling PDF files, and it's a great idea.  There is a however a 'but'.  With protected mode turned on Enterprise Vault FSA customers noticed that they were not able to open archived PDF files from the placeholder left behind after archiving.  They would get messages saying 'Access denied' :

 
A question arose on the Symantec Connect forums the other day about whether Adobe Acrobat 11 exhibits the same issue.  The short answer is yes..  
 
 

Workarounds :

*...

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Enterprise Vault Accounts and Permissions
Kristi Davis | 14 Mar 2013 | 0 comments

The following two articles provide the necessary information on the various accounts and users that are involved in an Enterprise Vault environment, as well as the permissions required by each.

Enterprise Vault Accounts and Permissions
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH76700

Compliance Accelerator and Discovery Accelerator Accounts and Permissions
http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH200788

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Estimating Enterprise Vault Index Volume Sizes
Rob.Wilcox | 14 Mar 2013 | 0 comments

 

With Enterprise Vault 10 came a whole new 64 bit indexing engine. Along with that is another slight change and that is in the indexing levels, there used to be three levels :

  • brief,
  • medium and
  • full

Now there are just two brief and full. In most documentation Symantec suggests that brief indexing requires about 4% of the overall size of all your archived data, and full needs about 13% (See this link).

So what does this mean in real life?

If you have 4 Tb of archived data (or it is predicted that is what you'll have in say 6 months) then you'll need the following storage for your indexes:

4 Tb = 4000 Gb (thereabouts)
4000 * 0.13 = 520 Gb

520 Gb of storage for your indexes.

Airing on the side of caution, if you allocated 15% of storage instead then you'd see the need for:

4000 * 0.15 = 600 Gb

...
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Why you might disable Strict Name Checking and Authentication Loopback on Enterprise Vault Servers
Rob.Wilcox | 12 Mar 2013 | 0 comments

 

A few days ago I hit an issue on one of my new Enterprise Vault servers that I had added to my Enterprise Vault site.  I was busily browsing different folders, and comparing via network browsing different aspects of the servers to make sure that they appeared to be the same.  I was doing this whilst multi-tasking some other tasks on a different machine.  Every now and again, whilst installing updates, changing settings and so on, I would get to a state where I browsed the remote 'new' machine and got errors like:

"Access denied"

or

"No network provider accepted the given  network path"

A reboot, and 15 minutes later when I got back to the task it seemed to work.. but then on my final bit of configuration I was *actually* concentrating, and hit these errors again.

The reason was that I was attempting to access the server, remotely, using a UNC path...

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Enterprise Vault and SQL Server Compatibility Levels
Rob.Wilcox | 28 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

 

A question that is raised from time to time on the Symantec Connect forums relates to SQL Compatibility Levels and whether or not they are important.  SQL Compatibility is described by Microsoft as :
 
"Compatibility level provides only partial backward compatibility with earlier versions of SQL Server."
 
You can see the current SQL Compatibility Level by executing:
 
select name, compatibility_level from sys.databases
 
In the end you want this to match your SQL Server version, running at an older version can have undesirable effects on Enterprise Vault.  The Enterprise Vault Compatibility Charts state:
 
"Note: Enterprise Vault supports SQL...
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FSA Migrations - Converting .url Shortcuts to FSA Placeholders
Evan Barrett | 26 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

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...

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Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2007 Updates
Rob.Wilcox | 25 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

 

Over the last week or so there have been two important updates in the Exchange world.  These are important for people who use Enterprise Vault to target Microsoft Exchange.

The first release is Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3.  It was talked about back in September that it was 'coming soon' and then on the 12th February it was announced as live on the Exchange Team Blog.  This update brings many fixes and most importantly allows coexistence with Exchange 2010 and Exchange 2013.  Whilst Enterprise Vault 10.0.3 does support Exchange 2013, it does not (yet) have certified support for Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3.  So, wait, before installing the service pack!

...

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Enterprise Vault 9.0.4 Cumulative Hotfix 3 Released
Rob.Wilcox | 24 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

 

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...

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Useful SQL Queries
Chris Warren | 20 Feb 2013 | 2 comments

So, I've been cobbling together a few SQL queries lately that help get large amounts of information from EV.  I figured I'd provide one of these to everyone.  As I post these queries I will also provide the information it gathers below so people know what they are looking at.  I hope these queries are as helpful to others as they have been for me.

(Note: As we cannot take into consideration every environment, please run these queries with caution as they MAY cause performance issues while being run)

-- Start Query
-- Prerequisite : Must be run on SQL instance with EnterpriseVaultDirectory DB

USE EnterpriseVaultDirectory 

SELECT Distinct
     CASE WHEN AV.archivename IS NULL THEN '--Folder' ELSE AV.archivename END AS 'ArchiveName/Folder?'
     ,CASE WHEN AV.Type = '5' THEN 'Shared' 
      WHEN AV....
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Enterprise Vault File System Archiving (FSA) Checkpointing
Rob.Wilcox | 19 Feb 2013 | 0 comments

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...

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