66.3 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 65.0, Managing Document Storage Areas in Libraries.

66.3.1 Archiving and Deleting Documents

You can use the Mailbox/Library Maintenance feature in the GroupWise Admin console to archive and delete documents on demand. See Section 46.4, Reducing the Size of Libraries and Document Storage Areas.

You can also configure the POA to archive and delete documents on a regular schedule. See Section 15.4.2, Scheduling Disk Space Management.

66.3.2 Backing Up and Restoring Archived Documents

When documents are archived, they are physically moved to a folder 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 folders. Each library has a set of archive folders. For example, gwdms (GroupWise Document Management Services) is one of the post office’s folders. The library folders exist under it, named lib0001-ff. Under each library folder is an archive folder, under which are the sequentially-numbered archival folders, named arnnnnnn (where nnnnnn is an integer with leading zeros). Each arnnnnnn folder is an archive set.

To move archived documents to backup:

  1. Ensure that you have a backup medium operating with your system.

  2. Ensure that 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 Documents that have not been archived cannot be removed to a backup medium.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
    

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When a user tries to access a document that has been archived, one of two things happens: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 folder 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 folder, 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 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 folder in the path listed in the Current Location field.

    The subfolder listed after the ..\archive folder 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 folder 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 folder because you have already backed them up.

66.3.3 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 the GroupWise Admin console, 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 44.0, Maintaining Library Databases and Documents.

  • A librarian has the ability to alter the Author field of documents. Therefore, a librarian can replace the previous user’s GroupWise user name with his or her own user name. 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 GroupWise user names in the Author field. For more information, see Section 64.4.2, Adding and Training Librarians.