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Conference iosg::all-in-1_v30

Title:*OLD* ALL-IN-1 (tm) Support Conference
Notice:Closed - See Note 4331.l to move to IOSG::ALL-IN-1
Moderator:IOSG::PYE
Created:Thu Jan 30 1992
Last Modified:Tue Jan 23 1996
Last Successful Update:Fri Jun 06 1997
Number of topics:4343
Total number of notes:18308

536.0. "Archive to optical disks" by MSDSWS::DUNCAN (I'm in trouble again!) Tue Apr 21 1992 22:07

    The customer I work for wants to use Archiving to clean up years of old
    E-Mail.  If they use an Optical Disk Jukebox, what type of
    performance/response time will the users see when they want to retrive
    a document?
    
    On shared documents, once everyone who had a message shared had it
    archived, would it's daf record be deleted?
    
    With the on-line Optical Disk, would Archiving be a good thing to do?
    
    
    Darryl
T.RTitleUserPersonal
Name		DateLines
536.1Archiving only tested against disk and tapeAIMTEC::PORTER_TTerry Porter, ALL-IN-1 Support, Atlanta CSCFri Apr 24 1992 16:3850
I know of no definate reason why archiving will not work using an optical disk
instead of a magnetic one I suspect there may be some problems. It really 
depends if VMS treats optical and magnetic devices differently. 

There were a couple of changes between V2.3 and V2.4 that may (or may not) make
a difference. 

In V2.3 archiving created and empty .ARCHIVE file in the archive area and wrote 
records to it. In V2.4 this was changed so that the .ARCHIVE file was created 
in the user's ALL-IN-1 directory and copied to the archive area when complete.

In V2.3 once a file was written to an archive area it stayed there for ever, in
V2.4 the file in the archive area is deleted after the user restores it.

The bottom line is that it needs testing to see where (if anywhere) the problems 
lie. Some things will be fixable (because they are done in COM files or
scripts) but others may not be.

In both versions archiving a document that is in a mail area reduces it's
usage count so eventually (when everyone has either archived or deleted all
their references to it) the SDAF record and the body file will be deleted.

One point to note is that if you start with a document in the mail area that is
referenced by 10 users and they all archive it the document is deleted from the
mail area, but there will be 10 copies in the archive area! So be prepaired
to use up disk space (but that's probably why they want to use optical disk
right?).

As to speed of restoring a document, thats the "how long is a piece of string"
question. I expect the gating factor in the preformance will be how long it
takes to locate the file on the disk (e.g. changing to another platter in the 
dukebox). Once you have located the files then restoring the document is little
more than copying the files back to where they should be and updating the
DOCDB and DAF.

The idea of archiving documents is to move little accessed documents to off-line
low cost media (e.g. Tape) and get back disk space (at the cost of longer 
access times). Keeping archive areas on-line will significantly increase 
total disk space usage and slightly increase document access times (the worst 
of both worlds?). Of course if the on-line media used for the archive areas 
(e.g. Optical Disk) is significantly cheaper than the on-line media used for 
the mail areas and user directories (e.g. magnetic disk) then it may still be 
worth doing.

The customer must weigh up the pros and cons and decide what is best in their
case.

HTH

Terry
536.2A thought from someone who doesn't know betterHOTAIR::MADDOXWhen in doubt, change itFri Apr 24 1992 18:1926
If the purpose is to get old mail messages off the magnetic disk and onto
optical disk for later reference might it make sense to just move old mail
shared areas to the optical device?  If this area is no longer pointed to by
the low/high logicals, then no new messages will be written to them and people
can still read these messages without having to restore them first.  Of course
they won't be stored in backup format so no compression will be done, but you
also won't have to worry about having 10 archived copies of the same message.

If you wanted permanent storage of documents, could you have a shared file
cabinet on the optical device and have people move non-changable documents to
it?

Unknows:

What happens when someone deletes their reference to a mail message on optical?

Will the format of messages or documents ever change such that when you upgrade
ALL-IN-1 it will try to do a convert on existing messages or documents?  This
would be problematic on a file on a WORM drive I would suspect.



It seems to me that it would be goodness if the user wanted to copy or read
an old mail message or document and didn't have to go through a restore first.

Joe
536.3copy sound goodMSDSWS::DUNCANI'm in trouble again!Fri Apr 24 1992 19:574
    Copy of the old closed shared directories sounds like it would be best.
    
    
    Darryl