About Document Management Services
Documents created with GroupWise
Document Type and Document Life
Any document created using Document Management Services must be associated with a document type. This is the only default document property that can be edited.
You can customize document usage by defining document types. The Document Type property has a Document Life field where you enter a number of days. This number is added to the last date opened to determine the first date the document will be available for archival or deletion.
Each time a document has an action performed on it, such as opening, saving, or checking out, the document life value is added to the current system date to determine the document's new expiration date.
A document life value of 0 (zero) indicates the document is immediately available for archiving or deletion.
Documents migrated to GroupWise 6 have their date opened values retained. Therefore, depending on the document life value they are given and how old the date is, it is possible for documents to be eligible for archiving or deletion the same day they are migrated.
Since a document's disposition depends on the date opened value, each document imported with a document life value must have an action performed on it to create its date opened value.
Document Disposition
When you run the Archive/Delete Documents option, documents in the selected libraries that have reached their document life dates are archived or deleted.
Deleted Documents
Documents due to be deleted are simply deleted from GroupWise, after which the document and its property information can no longer be found by any search. You can recover deleted documents from database backups.
Archive Directories
When documents are archived, their are moved to archive directories. These directories are named arnnnnnn (where nnnnnn is an incremented integer with leading zeros), and are automatically created as needed. They are sometimes referred to as archive sets. The archive directories are located at post_office/gwdocs/library_directory/archive.
When a document is archived, GroupWise determines if the document's blob will fit in the current archive directory. If the blob will not fit, another archive directory is created and the blob is archived there.
IMPORTANT: When you archive documents, they are physically moved to a directory at the post office, where disk space can be limited. You should regularly move archived documents to your backup medium (see Move Archived Documents to Backup Medium).
Archive Directory Size
The Maximum Archive Size property sets the arnnnnnn directory's size limitation. You should set this to mirror the capacity of your archival medium (such as tape or CD). The size should be equal to or less than your archival medium.
Consult your archival medium manuals for information that will help you to set up an effective backup strategy. Include in your strategy such concepts as multiple archive sets per backup medium, or allowing extra space for the medium's file storage data. Allowing an extra 10 percent is usually sufficient. For example, if your storage system has a capacity of 100 MB, then you would set your Maximum Archive Size to 90 MB for the library documents, allowing 10 MB for the file storage data.
Archive Sets
An archive set consists of documents in an archive directory. Documents are stored in files.
It is usually better to keep archive sets small in comparison to the size of the backup medium. This lets you back up archive directories often enough to keep your hard disk space from being used up too quickly between backups. For example, if the backup system has a 100 MB capacity, three 33 MB archive sets would fill it; therefore, the maximum archive size would be set at 33 MB.
If your archival system only lets you back up in one pass (in other words, you cannot perform consecutive backups to the medium as suggested in the 33 MB example), your maximum archive size would need to match the archival medium's capacity.
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