Best Practices for Arcserve Email Archiving

For setting up Email Archiving and archiving emails, here are some best practices:

  • Modify Passwords of Super Admin and udp_admin: Default passwords are publicly shared in documents over web and can be seen by all employees as well. To avoid misuse of access, we recommend to modify passwords of Super Admin and udp_admin immediately after the first login.
  • Set Retention rules and Archive Exception rules before configuring journaling: Default retention settings may often result in major storage issue later as the archived emails are purged only after completing the number of days set in default Retention settings. You may not want all emails to be available for longer duration. We recommend to determine and configure the Retention Rules\Settings and Archive Exception Rules before configuring the Email Archiving on the Mail Server. Any new Exception and Retention Rules is applied to the messages only from the time when you create new rules and is not applicable to existing archived messages.
  • Archive emails of only specific users: Create a Distribution group to archive emails of specific users.
  • Increase storage when disk is 90% full: When disk usage reaches 90%, disk usage percentage is displayed in Red to raise an alarm (Disk Usage in Super Admin, configuration). Increase disk space per your future requirements. Also, refer to projected storage requirement available in Health section of Super Admin to assess in how many days your disk will be full based on the current usage trend.
  • Hassle-free Import: Use POP3S, IMAP3S protocols for importing mails form Google professional mail boxes for hassle free operations.
  • Avoid peak hours for major work: Plan your product updates installation / Uninstallation when no active jobs are running or at non-peak hours of server operations for smother completion. The same applies to Migration, import, downloading emails, and performing search.
  • Install outlook plug-in of respective outlook architecture (x86 / x64): Install plug-in x86 on Outlook x86 , plug-in x64 on Outlook x64 to avoid compatibility problems.
  • Plan Monthly server maintenance: Plan Email Archiving server maintenance periodically once in a month to check the utilization of the Performance Key Indicators (PKI) status. If PKI appears over-utilized, increase CPU/Memory/Disk to reduce burden on the server.
  • Use Search criteria in Auditor: Auditor by default displays 100000 emails. Use specific search criteria specifying different parameters (Date, From, To, subject, size, wildcard character “*”) to view mails of specific user.
  • Make future search easier: Save all your search queries into saved searches and in future use them to retrieve data quickly. Also, enable Advanced search parameters to narrow down your search results.
  • Use Smaller PSTs: We recommend to have PST file within 10 GB, so that complete migration is not required in case of failure.
  • Thick vs Thin Provisioning: Select thick provisioning over thin provisioning during OVF deployment. Both are supported. But, we strongly recommend to user thick provisioning, so that the space is allocated to the system in the beginning itself. This action would prevent issues like running out of space.
  • Best Practices for Migration: Migration is a very time consuming operation, and time increases with more number of mails. At times, migration may consume more than an hour.
    • Start migration in non-peak hours.
    • Verify if the disk has enough space.

      • For example, for a PST file of size 10 GB you need at least 25 GB free space for migration.

    • Particularly for VMware, if the thin provision option is selected during deployment of OVF, verify that the ESX Server has enough space.