Reduce/Expire on post office - advice needed

Question

My organization has (had) an email retention policy of 30 days for
email and 365 days for appointments.
We have been on legal hold for the last 3 years so I am looking at
roughly that amount of data that will need to be removed when we get
the green light to come off of hold from the legal folks. (I'm told
that is coming soon)
My question is how does the expire/reduce run most efficiently? Should
I just set my 30/365 days settings and let it run or does it run more
effiently (quickly) if I did something like 365/720 then stepped down
to the 30/365, which would require 2 passes through the post office.
I know from observing the initial implementation of the policy, it is
going to take more than a week to get everthing down to size. Also, I
will probably have to run this stand alone so I can start/stop it as
needed. We can't take too much of performance hit if I just start it
from the server and let it run.
Once I get the post office trimmed down, I'll be re-enabling the
nightly scheduled expire/reduce options for maintenence.
Any advice or recommendations are appreciated.
Mark

Answer 1

Hi Andy -
Thanks for the input. My industry (without getting too specific)
makes the rules but does not need to follow them if you read through
the lines
I've had discussions about archiving until I'm blue in the face. I
would get more traction discussing it with my dog.
The size of the post office is roughly 500 user at 380GB. I'll have
to research the lenght of the full contents check that runs on the
weekend. I like the idea of the three runs.
On Tue, 04 Dec 2012 18:49:15 GMT, Andy Konecny
<[email protected]> wrote:
>In article <[email protected]>, Mark wrote:
>> My organization has (had) an email retention policy of 30 days for
>> email and 365 days for appointments.
>That's quite short and might get you in legal trouble. It might be very
>worth your while to investigate archival tools such as GWAVA's Retain.
>
>>
>> My question is how does the expire/reduce run most efficiently? Should
>> I just set my 30/365 days settings and let it run or does it run more
>> effiently (quickly) if I did something like 365/720 then stepped down
>> to the 30/365, which would require 2 passes through the post office.
>> I know from observing the initial implementation of the policy, it is
>> going to take more than a week to get everthing down to size. Also, I
>> will probably have to run this stand alone so I can start/stop it as
>> needed. We can't take too much of performance hit if I just start it
>> from the server and let it run.
>
>How long does a full Contents analyze/fix take? You'll be in about that
>time frame. What I would do is start with a pass on cleaning up just
>trash, then just the appointments, then the mail. How big is this
>PostOffice? (#Users & GB/TB?) How many CPUs? If virtual, adding some
>more for this reduction would help.
>
>Was that initial implementation done from a stand alone system or agent
>based? And what that on the current hardware config?
>
>
>Andy Konecny
>KonecnyConsulting.ca in Toronto
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Andy's Profile: http://forums.novell.com/member.php?userid=75037
>