Enterprise Vault™ Introduction and Planning

How to plan handling safety copies

Safety copies are copies of the archived items. In a mailbox, they are identified by the pending archive icon. When you set up a vault store, you must specify when Enterprise Vault deletes safety copies.

The type of environment in which you are running Enterprise Vault influences how you configure the process for safety copies.

If you are setting up a pilot system in a test environment, where there is no need to keep users' data, set up the vault store so that Enterprise Vault deletes the safety copies immediately after archiving.

If you are setting up a pilot system in a production environment, it may be necessary for users to get their data back again after testing Enterprise Vault. In this situation, edit the vault store properties so that Enterprise Vault never deletes the original items.

In the properties of each vault store you can choose to store safety copies in the original locations or on the storage queue. If you keep safety copies on the storage queue Enterprise Vault deletes the original items immediately after archiving so space in the original location is recovered soon. For example, when items are archived from an Exchange Server mailbox, mailbox icons change from "pending archive" to "archived" within a minute or two. The storage queue location must have sufficient space to retain the safety copies until after the next backup or replication of the vault store partition.

When you have completed your testing, you can set Enterprise Vault to delete the safety copies at the selected time.