One of the newest ways for users to quickly archive data either from their mailbox or from legacy PST files is to use Virtual Vault. Users can drag and drop items right into a particular folder within Virtual Vault and soon afterwards the items will be archived. It's really that simple. There are some things though that are worthy of knowing about before users go ahead and do this sort of thing en-masse.
What do users do?
- Drag and drop from Outlook, or from a PST file. If taking from PST files it should be remembered that the items are removed from the PST file, unless the user does a 'copy' of the items (or even takes a copy of the PST file first)
Where does the data go?
- Adds to the MDC file. This means a few things. Firstly the MDC file will grow, sometimes considerably, depending on how much data is added before the next sychronisation happens.
What happens when they next synchronise?
- UploadItem.aspx per item. Each item is uploaded from the MDC file to the EV server, and archived. Each item results in a call through a file called UploadItem.aspx. The IIS logs on the EV can be mined for useful information around this very aspect. It's possible to work out which users are doing this drag and drop operation, and how much data they are uploading.
What can we do policy-wise?
- It can be prevented completely. The screenshot below shows the policy settings which makes this drag and drop possible:
- It can be auto synchronised. One of the problems is that the data is somewhat at risk until the next Virtual Vault synchronisation run. There are some policy settings which can be implemented which help with this and they can be used to automatically trigger a synchronisation when one of the thresholds is crossed. The policy options are shown in the screenshot below:
