As a Domino Administrator you might have been asked by your users, “Where is this specific email!?” It has been a long-standing issue with older versions of Domino when an important document goes missing in an application used by multiple users, with no way to identify who/what/when/how a certain document was deleted. Fear no more! Domino document deletion logging is now a feature that was made available starting from Domino v10. You now have the ability to explain what might happen to the document they are looking for.
So, how can you implement it? It’s as simple as running compact task on a database, literally! A new compact task option is available to enable logging of data about deleted documents in databases that you specify. Here are the key requirements for such feature.
- Use Domino v10 and above.
- Have transaction logging enabled.
- Run compact task against the database that you want to monitor:
load compact <database path> -dl on “<comma separated list of items>”
where <database path> is a specific database or a directory of databases, relative to the data directory, for example, mail or discussion.nsf.
<comma separated list of items> is a list of fields to show in the logs to help you identify deleted documents. The fields must be one of these types: Text, Text_List, RFC822_Text, or Time. Suggested fields for mail documents are Subject, SendTo, From, and DeliveredDate. If you have custom fields on a document, you can use them as well.
The data is logged to a deletion log file called delete.log, which is located under the server Data directory, IBM_TECHNICAL_SUPPORT folder. When documents are deleted from a database, entries are added to that file.
When the server is restarted, a new deletion log file is created. Old deletion log files are renamed to delete_<servername>_yyyy_mm_dd@hh_mm_ss.log; for example: delete_Server1\Renovations_2020_01_10@06_28_45.log
Deleting a document from a database adds an entry to the current deletion log file with the following data. This data is provided in a CSV-compatible format.
|
Data in deletion log entry |
More information |
| Date and time of the document deletion | |
| Database from which the document was deleted. | Relative to the data directory |
| Replica ID of the database | Helps you find multiple replicas of a database in the log if the database name is not the same on all servers. |
| Process that did the deletion | For example:
|
| Name of the server or person who deleted the document | |
| Type of document deletion | Can be:
|
| Class of document deleted | Specified as one of the following hex values:
|
| UNID | Unique document identifier across replicas |
| Items | Up to four field values in a deleted document to help you identify it. Specified when you enable deletion logging. Although you can specify more than four field values, only the first four that are found are shown in the log entry. Each item has three parts: the item name, the length of the item value, and the first 400 characters of the item value. |
Then if you no longer need to monitor the document deletion on the database, run the following command: load compact <database path> -dl off
Here’s some things to keep in mind when using this feature.
- When entering the compact command, no spaces inside the comma separated list of items.
load compact mail/admin.nsf -dl on “SendTo,From,DeliveredDate” — Correct
load compact mail/admin.nsf -dl on “SendTo, From, DeliveredDate”— Incorrect
- More than 4 comma separated items can be put in when entering the command. However, only 4 comma separated list of items will be logged in the deletion log file.
Learn more about Domino Document Deletion Logging here.
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