Records Retention XML Files Causing Compliance Software Like Actiance to Surpass the 2GB EML Limit

Overview

When Records Retention is configured with XML, each day, an XML file is created with all the events that occurred that day. This file can become very large, depending on the type of events created. This, in turn, can be a problem with the archiving system that received the XML data.

This article explains why the Records Retention XML files cause a compliance software application like Actiance to surpass the 2GB limit for the EML files.

Problem Description

Records Retention creates an XML file. A security and archival application imports the XML file. From that point on, the archival application can run into size limitations depending on the software being used to archive the data.

For example, Actiance (a popular security and archival application) could convert the XML file to individual EML files. These, in turn, are sent to a different compliance application. Some of these files might turn out to be very large because they might contain binary data like documents, videos, or pictures. The compliance application could have file size limitations, which causes the individual files to fail to be received because of the amount of binary data they contain.

Resolution

This problem falls outside the scope of support for Records Retention. The Records Retention module was designed to keep one XML file per day and to store the binary data for each event as a 64-bit encoded string.

The design does not incorporate any splitting in the XML file. Therefore, it is up to the archival application to sort out how it can turn the XML data into smaller file sets that the compliance application can process.