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Veritas Enterprise Vault™ Troubleshooting Retention Folders

Last Published:
Product(s): Enterprise Vault (12.2)

Example of how conflict folders are created

Suppose that a mailbox contains the folders that are shown below. All these folders are linked to retention folders with the same name and position in the archive.

Mailbox folders

If the user renames the mailbox folder Finance to Money, the result is to create a folder structure in the archive like the one that is shown below:

Conflict folders in the archive

Where:

Blue folder

At the top of the folder tree, the Money, Stocks, and Bonds folders are not retention folders and not subject to the retention settings that you have defined for such folders. Instead, they take their retention settings from elsewhere, such as the settings that you have defined through the retention plan, provisioning group, or Enterprise Vault Policy Manager (EVPM).

These folders are initially empty, but Enterprise Vault now archives into them the items that are in the renamed mailbox folders. So, the retention settings that Enterprise Vault applies to these items are not those that it would previously have applied to them, if it had added them to retention folders.

Red folder

The Money1, Stocks1, and Bonds1 folders are conflict folders. (The digits at the ends of the folder names are a distinguishing feature of all conflict folders.) These folders contain the items that Enterprise Vault previously archived into the Finance, Stocks, and Bonds retention folders.

As with the folders at the top of the folder tree, the retention settings that apply to conflict folders are those that you have defined elsewhere in Enterprise Vault, such as in the retention plan or provisioning group. The retention folder settings no longer apply to the items in these folders.

If the user now creates a mailbox folder that has the same name and position in the folder list as a conflict folder in the archive, Enterprise Vault does the following:

  • Renames the conflict folder by appending another digit to its name. So, in the above example, creating a mailbox folder called Money1 causes Enterprise Vault to rename the conflict folder to Money11.

  • Creates a new archive folder that has the same name and position in the folder list as the newly created mailbox folder. So, in the above example, creating a mailbox folder called Money1 causes Enterprise Vault to create a new, empty Money1 folder in the archive. Enterprise Vault now archives the items from the Money1 mailbox folder into this folder.

This behavior is designed to stop Enterprise Vault from adding yet more items to the conflict folder.

In summary, the purpose of the conflict folders is to identify items that were previously in a retention folder but are now in an archive folder to which the previous retention settings no longer apply.

Orange folder

The folders at the bottom of the tree are retention folders. In the case of the Finance, Stocks, and Bonds folders, these are recreations of the original retention folders, and they are empty.

Moving mailbox folders and then creating new folders with the same name in their place

Further complications can arise if a user moves a mailbox folder that is linked to a retention folder and then creates a new mailbox folder with the same name in its place. So, in the mailbox folder example shown above, suppose that the user moves the Stocks subfolder so that it is at the same level as the Finance folder, and then creates a new Stocks subfolder under Finance. These activities cause Enterprise Vault to create the following folders in the archive:

  • A new instance of the Stocks subfolder under the Finance folder.

  • A new Stocks folder that is at the same level as the Finance folder.

  • A conflict folder called Stocks1.

However, this archive folder structure is only fully realized on the second occasion that the archiving task runs, after the user has made the folder changes in the mailbox. On the first occasion that the task runs, an interim folder structure is in place in the archive - which means that Enterprise Vault places the items from both the moved Stocks subfolder and its replacement into the Stocks1 conflict folder. This is automatically corrected when the archiving task next runs.