How To Manage Groupwise Archives Efficiently

[TripleJHJO]

I have a Groupwise 6.0 system with approximately 40 users. The user's archives are stored in various locations on my network, and in some cases, on their local hard drives.
Many of these archives are becoming quite large.

Is there an economical solution that will allow me to easily strip off old archived messages to move them to an off site storage tape?

Any information would be helpful.

Thanks,

J.Jensen

 

[marvhuffaker]

The problem with that is that the archive is stored as a set, it's difficult to just pull some messages out.

You should at least enforce policy that requires archives be stored in the users home directory or some other location on the network. that way you don't worry about local workstation failure.

If you want to pull messages out for good, put them to tape, you could do this..

Put the archives on tape, remove everything from the archive directory. That will essentially start the archive over. This will force you to go to multiple sources should you ever need to pull messages back.

Marvin Huffaker, MCNE
Marvin Huffaker Consulting, Inc.
A Novell Platinum Partner

http://www.redjuju.com

 

[goombawaho]

I used to do this for departed user to archive their mail as a CYA for the company, but it might work for you.

I'd download all their data to a caching mailbox on the local hard drive. Then put that mailbox along with their mailbox password, FID, version of GW client used and user name on a CD/DVD.

That way, I could fire up their mailbox on any computer (provided it had the same version of GW installed) after copying the data over from CD/DVD. You have to set the cached mailbox folder as NOT read only after copying from CD/DVD.

What you could do is use this approach on a yearly basis or every 6 months depending on user mailbox size. By their nature, archives aren't as stable as you'd like them to be so I never liked users having them, especially if they were getting large.

This is more work for you, but....
It takes data and e-mail volume off your server and it gives you a permanent archive of their yearly mail activity for lawsuits or posterity.

Of course, the REAL solution is a mail archiving software solution that receives a copy of all e-mail (inbound/outbound) BEFORE users ever get to touch it. That ensures that you have a COMPLETE record of all e-mail activity without user "interference". But then you have deal with the backup of that system or how much data it can store.

 

[goombawaho]

I should have said that after doing your caching for archive as above: Force a mailbox reduction on the mailbox(es) to get rid of items older than X days, etc., etc.

You have to have some sort of mailbox retention policy or users will eat your out of house and home and disk space. Get management to sign off on the policy and then you can begin.