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Office 365 Backups - Data Aging

  • 4 February 2021
  • 4 replies
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RHITSec
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I am struggling greatly with how CommVault handles Exchange Online backup data aging. I have heard on numerous occasions that CommVault never actually purges message data from disk when an Exchange Online backup reaches its retention limit.

It was explained to me that the data is just “marked as aged” and is never deleted from disk. Since there is no backup cycle (incremental forever) per-se with Exchange Online Backups that means the junk message I receive from Amazon today will persist on disk for all time.

Please convince me how this is not a really bad solution - help me come up with convincing argument against moving away from CommVault for Exchange Online backups. Rumor has it CV is developing a way to properly purge/age data but there is no expectation it will happen any time soon.

 

Thanks!

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Best answer by Bryant 26 February 2021, 00:11

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It’s our job to keep people safe.

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Bryant
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Hi RHITSec:

Well first off, I am sorry that you haven’t blocked those junk emails.

Seconds the rumors that we never purge is just that - a rumor. We do purge! 

However there are several factors that can cause a back up job not to purge.

If one or more emails in a job have been placed on Legal Hold or have retention then the job will not be purged. This is a consequence of InfoGov rules placed on that job. We also respect the retention implemented natively in EXO. The other factor is that the EXO agent doesn’t do partial purges. We have an active development project to deliver partial deletion. This should reduce your retained email significantly. 

We know that this is impacting our customers’ storage costs and in general a pain in the A$$. I don’t know who set your expectations that this will not come anytime soon, but it will. Trust me, I don’t want you to have to keep all that junk email from Amazon either.

Something to think about - A great solution to this problem is to migrate to Metallic and put all those infrastructure pains and costs on us. Hell, you could put indefinite retention on all emails an never have to worry about the costs.

Bryant Bell - Senior Product Manager
RHITSec
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Bryant,

 

Thanks for the reply! So, can you explain this sentence “The other factor is that the EXO agent doesn’t do partial purges.” I think this is what I might have been referring to in my original post. Does it mean that that 100% of the email from the job from last Thursday needs to be entirely removed from inboxes before the data is removed from disk? Which, basically, means that it will never be deleted?

Was looking at Metallic before we opted for on Prem. It was just so much $$ I couldn’t come up with an argument for it. Well, up until now of course haha.

Thanks in advance!

It’s our job to keep people safe.
Bryant
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What it means is that the backups are grouped as jobs. If just one of the emails in that job has a legal hold or other retention that is outside the purge date then the whole job will not be deleted. This is a case of one rotten apple spoils the bushel.

 

A dev project is in the works to rectify this.

Bryant Bell - Senior Product Manager
RHITSec
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Thanks Bryant appreciate the reply. I figure that might be the case. To purge pieces of the jobs, would be a huge benefit. I can’t wait for them to implement this!

It’s our job to keep people safe.

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