Your GroupWise Archive

By Jason Gutierrez, Network Computing Services Messaging Specialist

Thanks to many of you who came out this semester for GroupWise training. Of the many topics we covered, questions regarding the GroupWise archive and the 180 day rule were most frequent. For those of you who couldn't make the training sessions this time around, here are a few points covered in the class that you may be interested in.

180 Day Rule

Everyday the GroupWise system evaluates the age of a message to see if it passes the 180 day age threshold. If it does then the message is deleted from the GroupWise mailbox and cannot be recovered.

Archiving is a process that offloads messages (mail, appointments, tasks, reminder notes) to a locally stored archive. The archive can only be opened using the GroupWise client, and only after the owner of the archive has logged into their GroupWise account (locally stored means a location on your computer or file server). Any messages kept in the GroupWise archive are not subject to the 180 Day Rule. For more information in setting a local archive location, see my tutorial here http://ncs.unt.edu/gw/basicgroupwise/manual/Chapter3/c3-3.html

Manual vs. Automated Archiving

There are two basic ways to archive messages in GroupWise. If you wish to manually archive a message, simply select the message in GroupWise and from the ACTIONS menu select ARCHIVE. If you would like to automate this process, my tutorial on configuring the cleanup settings will help. You can view that tutorial online at http://ncs.unt.edu/gw/basicgroupwise/manual/Chapter3/c3-4.html

(Note: As a general rule of thumb, I do not recommend setting your auto archive date to more than 150 days, because if you are away on vacation you will have a 30 day buffer protecting you from mail being deleted.)

Backup Your Archive

Finally, as we approach the end of the semester and the Christmas break, you may want to consider backing up your archive to some form of removable media like a CD-R/W, Zip disk, or tape drive. In general it is a good idea to make a backup of your archive once a month, and this is a great time to start. You may locate your archive by consulting the archive directory path that you set in your environment options ( http://ncs.unt.edu/gw/basicgroupwise/manual/Chapter3/c3-3.html ). Inside the designated directory you will find a folder named of***arc, where the *** is a three letter/number combination that signifies your particular account. As I stated earlier, none of the files within are viewable by any application other than GroupWise. Make sure that the backup of this directory is part of your personal backup plan.