23.4 Managing Documents in Libraries

As more and more documents are added to your GroupWise libraries, you must manage the disk space occupied by libraries and respond to various changes in your GroupWise system.

See also Section 22.6.2, Managing Document Storage Areas.

23.4.1 Archiving and Deleting Documents

The Document Type property determines what happens to documents whose document life in your GroupWise system has expired. For a review of the document types and document life, see Section 21.3.2, Document Types.

You can use the Mailbox/Library Maintenance feature in ConsoleOne to archive and delete documents on demand, as described in Section 30.4, Reducing the Size of Libraries and Document Storage Areas.

You can also configure the POA to archive and delete documents on a regular schedule, as described in Section 36.4.2, Scheduling Disk Space Management.

23.4.2 Backing Up and Restoring Archived Documents

When documents are archived, they are physically moved to a directory in the post office, where disk space can be limited. You should move archived documents to your backup medium regularly.

Moving Archived Documents to Backup

When documents are archived, they are placed in automatically created archive directories. Each library has a set of archive directories. For example, gwdms (GroupWise Document Management Services) is one of the post office’s directories. The library directories exist under it, named lib0001-ff. Under each library directory is an archive directory, under which are the sequentially-numbered archival directories, named arnnnnnn (where nnnnnn is an integer with leading zeros). Each arnnnnnn directory is an archive set. To view the gwdms directory, see Post Office Directory in GroupWise 2012 Troubleshooting 3: Message Flow and Directory Structure.

To move archived documents to backup:

  1. Make sure you have a backup medium (such as tape, CD, or DVD) operating with your system.

  2. Make sure you have already archived documents that have reached their expiration dates. Documents that have not been archived cannot be removed to a backup medium.

  3. Start the software for your backup medium.

  4. When the backup software asks for the location of your archive files, give the full path.

    Example:
    j:\post_office\gwdms\lib0\archive\ar000001
    

If users need the backed-up documents in the future, see Restoring Archived Documents.

Restoring Archived Documents

When a user tries to access a document that has been archived, one of two things happens:

  • If the document is in the post office archive set, and has not yet been physically moved from the archive location, the document opens normally. The user does not realize it was archived. The document is unarchived from the archive set at that time; that is, it is moved back to the library document directory from which it was archived. It is also given a new archive date according to the document type.

  • The user sees a message indicating the document cannot be opened. In this case, the archive set containing the document has been physically moved to a backup medium. Therefore, the document cannot be automatically unarchived. In this case, the user might contact you, asking you to locate or recover the document. You can restore either the document’s BLOB or the archive set that contains the BLOB. After the document is restored to its archive directory, the user will be able to open the document normally.

To restore archived documents from a backup medium:

  1. Obtain the Document Number for the document the user was trying to access.

  2. In the GroupWise Windows client, click Tools > Find.

  3. Specify the Document Number, then click OK.

  4. Right-click the document in the Find Results listing, then click Properties > Version.

  5. Note the archive directory in the path listed in the Current Location field.

    The subdirectory listed after the ..\archive directory is the archive set containing the document, for example, \ar000001.

  6. If you have the ability to recover individual files from your backup medium, also note the BLOB file name listed in the Current Filename field.

  7. Determine where you backed up the archive set, then copy either the archive set or the individual BLOB file to the archive directory specified in the Current Location field that you noted earlier.

  8. You can now notify the user that the requested document is available.

  9. When you are sure the user has opened the document (causing it to be unarchived), you should delete any files remaining in that archive directory because you have already backed them up.

23.4.3 Handling Orphaned Documents

If you remove public rights for a library, some documents might become inaccessible. For example, if a user who has been denied access to the library is the only user who had access to certain documents, those documents become orphaned. No other user can access or search for those orphaned documents. This is because document security is controlled by the user listed in the Author and Creator fields in the document’s properties. In other words, if the author or creator no longer has access to a document, neither does anyone else.

However, orphaned documents can be reassigned to another author so that someone can access them again. This can be done in one of two ways:

  • In ConsoleOne, the Analyze/Fix Library action in Mailbox/Library Maintenance can reassign orphaned documents to a specified user. Then, the new user has access to all orphaned documents in that library. For more information, see Section 28.2, Analyzing and Fixing Library and Document Information.

  • A librarian has the ability to alter the Author field of documents. Therefore, a librarian can replace the previous user’s GroupWise ID with his or her own ID. In doing so, the librarian becomes the new author of the document. This can also be done as a mass operation for multiple documents with varying user IDs in the Author field. For more information, see Section 22.6.4, Adding and Training Librarians.