Many people realise after using Enterprise Vault for some time that there are an awful lot of relatively small files on the Vault Store partition disks. These sort of things often cause problems for traditional backup software. So what can you do?
One option is to add the files to CAB files, a process in Enterprise Vault known as 'Collection'. The CAB files use the regular Microsoft CAB format, the files added to them are already compressed and so are not compressed again.
Using CAB files like this, particularly on 'old' data, can definitely help with things like backups. I've written about that before. There is a neat clean up process, which has been written about too.
One of the problems I happened to see recently related to the version of the CAB SDK which is used in versions of Enterprise Vault prior to EV 10. In this older SDK only one process/thread could access and extract data from a CAB file at any time. This can cause problems when it comes to migrating data to a new target environment because here multiple threads are trying to potentially access data in the same CAB file. In Enterprise Vault 10 and later a newer Microsoft CABinet SDK is used, which eliminates this problem.
Do you use 'Collections' in Enterprise Vault? Let me know in the comments below.