Beware of Purge setting in the Domino Journal

Denny Russell  May 27 2009 02:57:54 PM

In working with a customer, I stumbled across how the purge setting works in the Domino Journal.  When setting up Journaling, you've got options for what should be done with the journal documents over time.    As you can see, there is a 'Method' field in the Database Management section that allows you to set this to 'Purge/Compact' with a specified number of days.



All sounds great, right?  And it works exactly as designed.  So where's the problem you ask? Glad you asked.

One of our customer's had called believing Mail Attender must be deleting items out of their Archived Journals.  Knowing we couldn't be deleting these documents based on their configuration, I started to dig.  To be compliant with their policy, they were archiving journals and placing a copy of the Domino Journal off to another storage device outside of Domino.  Again, no issues yet.  However, they wanted to search these Journals and used Domino Dirlinks to allow Domino to have access to this stored data.  Herein lies the problem I've eluded too.  To purge the data from the Journal, they've enabled the "Remove documents not modified..." setting in the Replication Settings field.



So now, the 'archived' data, because of the Dirlinks AND the Purge/Compact settings being enabled, Domino started removing old data that was older than 7 days as specified in the Configuration document.

So my warning to anyone using Domino Journaling is beware of this Purge/Compact setting especially if you are making copies of the Old Journals and placing them to another location as part of your Retention Policy.  Make sure of this setting as you may not know this data is gone until the time you need it.

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