Why archive mailbox

If a user has manually purged an item from the Recoverable Items folder, an administrator can recover the item within the same 14 day window, through a feature called Single Item Recovery. This feature allows administrators to conduct a multi-mailbox search to find purged items and then use the Search-Mailbox Windows PowerShell cmdlet to move the items from the discovery mailbox to users' mailboxes.

For more information, see Enable or disable single item recovery for a mailbox. The Single Item Recovery period is 14 days by default, but it can be customized in some circumstances. If an administrator has placed a user's mailbox on In-Place Hold or Litigation Hold, purged items are retained indefinitely and the day window does not apply.

When administrators delete users from the on-premises Exchange Server, the users' archives are also deleted. If the deleted archive mailboxes need to be recovered, the Microsoft support team can perform this recovery. A recovered archive will contain all of the mail stored in it at the time it was deleted. Administrators have 30 days from the time a user's mailbox is deleted to request an archive mailbox recovery. After 30 days, the archive mailbox is not recoverable. Archive mailboxes in Exchange Online Archiving are replicated to multiple database copies, in geographically dispersed Microsoft data centers, to provide data restoration capability in the event of a messaging infrastructure failure.

For large-scale failures, business continuity management is initiated. To view feature availability across plans, standalone options, and on-premises solutions, see Exchange Online Archiving service description.

Feedback will be sent to Microsoft: By pressing the submit button, your feedback will be used to improve Microsoft products and services. Privacy policy. More data means extra stickiness. Roll on to , and Microsoft started to enable expandable archives in customer tenants. After getting past the deployment issues, Microsoft discovered other operational problems, like the way some migration projects took the opportunity to move vast amounts of data from legacy archiving systems to Exchange Online, often using shared mailboxes as the archive target.

Using journaling, transport rules, or auto-forwarding rules to copy messages to an archive mailbox is not permitted. Very large archives caused other concerns, such as the amount of time required to move mailboxes with large archives between mailbox databases or servers Microsoft commonly rebalances mailbox load across Exchange Online servers.

Concerned by the use of auto-expanding archives, Microsoft attempted to rein in their growth by imposing a 1 TB maximum in November The limitation was artificial in that it did not exist in software and no mechanism was available to control growth past the new limit.

In January , Microsoft retreated from the 1 TB limit and updated the Exchange Online service description to remove any mention of a maximum archive size.

Tenants will be told, administrators will be given the tools to manage large archive mailboxes, and the limit will be enforced. So far, MC published September 28 is the communications plan. The change happens on November 1, , and when the new limit is active, users will be unable to add more information to archive mailboxes if it pushes the mailbox past the 1. In technical terms, Exchange Online will allow you to move data into the archive up to the limit but will not add any more 50 GB chunks to expand the archive mailbox.

I suspect that the new limit will not affect many users. In any case, the new limit will arrive on November 1, Hunting down individual mailboxes in a GUI is boring and this is exactly the kind of situation when PowerShell shines.

Not all archive-enabled mailboxes have expanding archives. The output of the report is a CSV file. Knowledge Base. Using Office online archiving and retention policies Each Office email enabled account features an Online Archive mailbox. Messages can be moved to the archive automatically or manually. The Online Archive mailbox is easily accessible through Outlook on the web, and Microsoft Outlook and higher.

Messages in the archive mailbox are easily searchable and viewable from any location Moving messages to the Online Archive mailbox Users can drag and drop messages from. Users can import data to the archive in the following ways: Import data from a. Drag email messages from. Drag email messages from the primary mailbox into the archive. Let archive policies automatically move email messages from the primary mailbox, based on the age of the messages.

Login to your Outlook on the web account. In the list of Folders in the left hand pane, right-click the custom created folder to which you want to assign an archive policy. In the screenshot below, this is the " Example folder ". From the dropdown menu that appears, select Assign policy , to open a second dropdown menu, Archive policy.

From the Archive policy dropdown menu, choose the archive policy you wish to apply. Choose from: Personal 6 month move to archive 7 months Personal 1 year move to archive 1 year Personal 5 year move to archive 5 year Personal never move to archive Never Use parent folder policy Note — Retention Policy : Using the procedure above, from the Assign Policy dropdown options, you may also set a Retention Policy that will automatically delete messages in a custom folder.

In the list of Favorites in the left hand pane, click the custom created folder to which you want to assign an archive policy.