Have you ever wondered why an archive takes a long time to delete? Sometimes you may be deleting a large archive and it seems to sit in the Vault Admin Console with the 'Marked for deletion' status and the little logo for a long time. Well, it takes a long time because delete is a lot like archive in that there is a lot of different steps and processes that need to be gone through before the archive can be deleted.
Let's take an example.
Firstly we need to get the VaultEntryID for the archive we want to delete. We can that with this bit of SQL:
Use EnterpriseVaultDirectory
Select ArchiveName, VaultEntryID, ArchiveStatus
From ArchiveView
Where ArchiveStatus = 4
That will show all the archives which are marked for deletion. If you know the archive name, then you could replace the 'Where ArchiveStatus = 4' with 'Where ArchiveName = 'Name of the Archive''.
Now you need to know which Vault Store the users archive lives on, you can find this out in the VAC quite easily, so I'll not cover that here. Then you do the following bit of SQL to see how many items there are left to process (ie delete):
Use VSDbName
Select count(*)
From view_saveset_archive_vault
Where ArchivePointID = 'VaultEntryID from previous query'
This item-count will gradually gone down to zero. Once it reaches zero, the archive will then be removed from the directory database.