INTRODUCTION

Although the case backup time is proportional to the number of unique documents in eDiscovery, the presence of any large production exports has a much bigger impact on the case backup time. An image production export for example, can consist of thousands, sometimes even millions, of small TIF files. Load File Imports also generate an XML file for each document family. In addition, use of Load File Import custom fields mapped with the data type "Long Text" also generate a separate file for each custom field value. Since a case backup is heavily disk I/O intensive, the presence of many small files can increase the case backup time considerably.  
 

HOW TO DETERMINE IF A CASE IS LIKELY TO CONTAIN LARGE EXPORTS

One way to determine if a case backup is likely to be including one or more large exports, is to examine the file times of the files created in the case backup. 

You can get a listing of the file times in a case backup as follows:

• Change to the directory containing the case backup. For example:
  d:\>cd CW\V##\caseBackups\cases\0.6.7.346939725-SECvTamas\BACKUP_Mon

• Generate a file listing and redirect it to an output file for review:
  dir /s /t:w > D:\case_backup_listing.log
 

The following example shows the file times of the top-level directories in an example case backup:

These times indicate that the backup finished around 04:23 AM, and started no later than 02:35 AM.

Looking at the times of the files inside the_lds_case_directory:

Notice how the MySQL part of the backup (filedsdbdump_lds_case_a82593ltl3.sql) finished at 02:35 AM, but the “data” directory has a last modified time much later at 04:21 AM. The “data” directory includes all the files from any production exports (or print jobs). The last modified time of this “data” directory indicates that the majority of the case backup time was spent creating (and compressing) the backup files in the “data” directory. This would suggest that there may be many files there from a production export.

HOW TO REMOVE UNWANTED EXPORTS FROM A CASE

An easy way to reduce the case backup time is to remove any unwanted production exports from the case.

Use the following steps to identify and remove any unwanted production exports:

• Go to the “System > Jobs” page and filter by job type “Export” (Figure 1):
  
  Figure 1.
  

• Click on the yellow icon to the left of “Success” in the “Status” column to see the job log (statusLog.txt) file.
  Scroll to the bottom to see where the export files are located (Figure 2):
  
  Figure 2.
  

  This shows that the files can be found under the following directory:
  D:\CW\V##\data\esadb\dataStore_case_aigo6swdfr_13100101\fileManager\0.14.7.1\jobRun_350
  
  If we look in this directory then we see the following (Figure 3):
  
  Figure 3.
  

  The XML_EXPORT_CONTENT sub-directory contains all of our TIF images (Figure 4):
  
  Figure 4.
  

• Backup the D:\CW\V##\data\esadb\dataStore_case_aigo6swdfr_13100101\fileManager\0.14.7.1\jobRun_350 directory (if you want to keep the export).

• Delete the export from the “System > Jobs” page, by clicking on the trashcan icon (Figure 5):
  
  Figure 5.
  

  Once this has been deleted, the directory D:\CW\V##\data\esadb\dataStore_case_aigo6swdfr_13100101\fileManager\0.14.7.1\jobRun_350 will no longer exist, and the case backup will be smaller and therefore quicker.