Recover deleted emails from Centera

Hi Geoff -

Your advisor wasn't completely wrong per se, but after some time (14 - 30 days) garbage collection eventually comes along and performs the actual delete operation (unlike in the days of FAT16 where undelete could work months/years later).

However, many email archiving systems containerize email, in which case the container is not deleted until all of the email within is expired/deleted.  You might consider posing this question to your email archiving vendor.

Good Luck,

Mike Horgan

If a delete Call is executed by Centera (if retention period is elapsed) the metadata file is replaced immediately with the "reflection" file and the corresponding Blob is marked for deletion for the subsequent Garbage collection run, which finally discards the blob if it is not referenced by another metadata file. Garbage collections runs permanently and hence there is no chance to get back an object deleted in 2008.

Retention was set to governance, or whatever the forever setting is, from the get go and no cleanup schedules were ever manually setup. Did the Centera have a default policy that would run? How do I verify that? I have console access to this device by either GUI or command line. This thing was utilized for Email Xtender only. Any and all help is appreciated.

Be aware that  the Centera does NOT delete expired objects automatically! The delete command has to come from an application!

If the Centera is in Compliance Plus mode AND the application does NOT set a retention period or class, then these objects will get the default retention and as this is infinite (-1) for a CE+ Centera ANY delete command will be rejected