Autosave database size revisited: it SEEMED like a great idea but…

Home » Autosave database size revisited: it SEEMED like a great idea but…

Just to remind anyone who didn’t read my post last week, the gist was that I noticed my autosave database was very large, even though it had no documents in it and rarely had documents in it. The apparent cause was that default Space Savers setting on the Replication Settings was set, so documents were removed after 90 days, and deletion stubs after 30 days. So I made the seemingly obvious step of reducing the duration, so documents were removed after 3 days and deletion stubs would be deleted each day.

This seemed a great idea. But all good plans and that…

Since then, each day, 24 hours after I last got the prompt, if I create an email I am prompted:

“The Replication Cutoff Date indicates that documents before 06/07/2010 16:29:36 should be purged from the database as_PWithers.nsf. Would you like it to be done now?”

Considering that I’ve told it to delete the documents, I would expect it to do so, not prompt me. That’s the behaviour I got when autosave was on and the default 90 days was used (because I’ve had autosave running since I installed R7 several years ago, and I’ve never had the prompt). But I can’t find any setting to tell it to do so, or to disable the prompt. Perhaps there’s an ini setting I’m not aware of. Or perhaps it’s somewhere in the mail template (because a new mail triggers the alert).

Regardless of all this, the most frustrating part is that I know that the autosave database doesn’t contain any documents that old.

Personally I can understand the message, and I know there’s nothing to delete. But if this were rolled out to users, which would seem sensible, I can imagine helpdesks would receive a lot of calls. So unless anyone knows a solution, I’d have to say it’s probably not a good idea to change the default setting for the autosave database. But it’s frustrating that that give me a file 80Mb large.

3 thoughts on “Autosave database size revisited: it SEEMED like a great idea but…”

  1. I agree Paul.. I hope there is a way to stop the message, but this is the eensy weensy teeny weeny type of behavior that often alienates Notes users from the product. One user gets the prompt and they immediately complain to everyone around them “how (insert favorite adjective) is this…”.

  2. Paul,

    2 questions:

    a) Autosave wasn’t meant to be replicated. It is a local security measure against crashes, nothing to be shared elsewhere. Why does it replicate for your?

    b) If your autosave database is empty… why not delete it? It gets recreated on client start. Usually during an upgrade I remove *.box and as_*.nsf

  3. @Stephan My autosave only is local. I went to Replication Settings – Space Savers to reduce the size. Removing it each time the PC is closed down with a batch file seems the best way to ensure it doesn’t keep growing. But I’m still confused why changing the default period for removing documents triggers a daily prompt.

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